Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You can't see the forest for the trees.

If there was one thing the planet Earth was better at than any other in the galaxy, it was the manufacture of idioms. Maybe it was a byproduct of their sheltered existence, five thousand years near enough spent shielded from the countless dangers of the galaxy at large with nothing left to do but fight each other and invent phrases that sounded like poetry, but really were just deliberately confusing ways to explain simple things.

He understood it now, of course: that someone was so fixated on a singular detail that they were blind to whatever greater context it was part of. But his younger self took their sweet time getting there. The idiom asked him to imagine a forest, and imagine trees, except you couldn't see the forest. Was it an invisible forest? Or, could you see a forest, but not the forest? Were these trees in a forest they didn't belong to? That was certainly a feeling he could relate to, something worth combining words together strangely in an attempt to convey. But no, it was just grammar being weird. You couldn't see the forest because you were seeing the trees. Were the trees in the way? Were you unable to see what lay beyond the trees because they obscured your vision — unable to contemplate what lay beyond because you were too focused on what was right in front of you? Or was it a warning, a cautionary tale against getting distracted by one thing, and losing sight of the fact that you were in the forest, and the trees had you surrounded?

It got worse when you allowed a British person to join the conversation. For them, it was you can't see the wood for the trees, which made even less sense. Trees were made of wood. How could the thing prevent you from seeing what the thing was made of? If you said something similar, you can't see the rock for the mountain, you'd have sounded like a fool. But no, it was one of those Britain having different words things again, like when they called a sidewalk the pavement, or when pants meant underpants. For them, the idiom was even more confusing. But then, by getting distracted by the words of the idiom at the expense of understanding the meaning it was supposed to convey, was he himself failing to see the linguistic forest because of the linguistic trees?

It was exactly that kind of thinking that had resulted in Jake Bosworth being left here guarding the Stargate, rather than having a chance to interact with the locals. Well, local. One specific local, really: Shamda, one of the nomads that Stargate Command had found among the ruins of Vis Uban, and strategically relocated for their safety so that they could use the planet as part of an elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful plan to blow up Anubis' fancy planet-destroying super-ship. SG-13 had been the ones assigned to help resettle the nomads here to P3X-367, and here they remained three years later, with SG-13 chosen to help compel them to leave.

Bosworth spared a moment to wonder how Wodan and his people must have felt about all this. Wodan's people had been victims of the Goa'uld Nirrti, who had wiped out most of their population with some kind of sickness and experimented upon the rest, futzing with their DNA and unlocking all manner of mutant superpowers: and not in a cool X-Men sort of way, more of a gross, live-in-the-sewers Morlocks sort of way. Freed and healed, the locals had found themselves with a mountain of emotional baggage and a half-empty village to rattle around in. More than happy to help them resolve the latter, Stargate Command had quickly come knocking with refugees needing a couch to crash on, and P3X-367 responded with open arms — that time, and the next time, and the next. Maybe they really were happy to help. Maybe, after all that loss at Nirrti's hands, a community full of displaced strangers was better than a village-wide mausoleum of empty houses and painful reminders. Or, perhaps the locals had been too focused on the trees that saved them asking them to help out the trees in need that they'd not recognised the forest of unfamiliars they'd inadvertently welcomed into their home.

With a sigh, Bosworth turned his attention away from his philosophical musings, and out towards his surroundings. You couldn't see most things for the trees on P3X-367, truth be told. Many of the worlds that the Stargate connected to were pretty well forested, but this one was something else: save for the crude narrow roadway that carved its way down the hillside beneath the gate, trees lay in every direction: flanking you on either side as dense pillared walls of vegetation, looming at you from the utterly tree-encrusted mountainside opposite, and framing your vision as you tried to look upward into a sky filled with a just enough to be cool number of moons. Even the village, its spires and onion towers artistically draped across the mountainside opposite, barely managed to wrestle enough space away from the forest to accommodate all of those who now dwelt there. You can't see the village for the trees floated gently through Bosworth's mind.

A flicker of motion in his peripheral vision pulled Bosworth's attention to his left, as his fellow sentry unhitched a canteen from her belt and afforded herself a swig. "You holding up okay?" he cast in her direction. Senior Lieutenant Natalia Tolinev, Russian Air Force. Or perhaps it was Tolineva; from Bosworth's understanding, that's how Russian surnames were supposed to work, but even after all this time working together, he'd never managed to provoke enough sentences of actual conversation from her to ever feel comfortable asking. The last time Russians had set foot on P3X-367, SG-4's leader had wound up exploding into a cascade of bodily fluids: yet another example of the Russians and their often fatally bad luck with all things Stargate, as Tolinev herself was acutely aware.

"Da."

It was about as much as Bosworth had expected, honestly. There were plenty of soldiers at Stargate Command who adopted a why say twenty words when you can just say two approach to conversation, but Tolinev took it to a whole new level. It wasn't the language barrier, Bosworth was certain of that: she was able to talk just fine when it was requested of her in debriefs, and she was more than happy to chime in and correct Bosworth on any specific details whenever he tried to exaggerate SG-13's past exploits for dramatic effect. Bosworth didn't mind it all that much, though: if nothing else, it played into his theory that to be as successful as possible, an SG team needed to emulate the winning formula of SG-1. They had their Daniel Jackson in Captain Satterfield; they'd opted for a classic O'Neill rather than a Mitchell in Colonel Dixon; and Bosworth's own contributions as the smartest, most charming, and most attractive clearly made him the Colonel Carter. It didn't bother him in the slightest if Lieutenant Tolinev was going full method actor in her dedication to be their Teal'c.

That line of thought came to a screeching halt as something that seemed almost like the faintest flicker of a smile tugged at the corner of Tolinev's mouth. "Your concern is appreciated."

Bosworth carefully selected a tree a few meters beyond Tolinev's position, and allowed it to become the full focus of his attention as he allowed the gravity of this moment to sink in. Five consecutive words, the last four of them completely unprompted. Possibly even evidence of tangible human emotion. A historic occasion, one that would absolutely be marked down in his personal mission report as soon as they were back on Earth; but also a delicate situation, one that needed to be handled with care, like trying to coax a frightened kitten out from under a parked car.

"Colonel Evanov was a good officer."

It seemed like a safe bet: respectful, stoic, on topic, the kind of statement that soldiers who didn't know how small talk worked would make.

"They are all good officers," Tolinev countered, but there was an unfamiliar softness to her words, unlike the stern nature of the corrections that she usually aimed in his direction. "Stargate Command employs no other kind."

For a moment, Bosworth wasn't on P3X-367; he was on another, similar but different world, standing in a similar but different treeline. P3X-666. Cold. Humid. Gunfire and staff blasts tearing at the silence. Ozone, cordite, and the coppery tang of blood in the air. The groans of an injured Simon Wells behind him. The reassuring voice of Doctor Fraiser holding the chaos together. And then another staff blast, uncomfortably close. And then nothing.

Bosworth bowed his head in agreement. "Yeah. They're all good officers."

Suddenly, Bosworth didn't care about trees, or idioms. He didn't care about the fact that he'd been left on sentry duty with one of the top five least conversational people in the galaxy. All he cared about was the forest, the mission, the reason they were here. This wasn't routine: they were here with purpose and urgency. Two days ago, the village had sent word that a man had arrived through the Stargate, preaching about false gods and the blessings of the path of Origin. Lucky for them, no one on 367 was falling for that kind of BS; and so here they were, SG-13 and as many other bodies as the Beta Site could spare, uprooting the natives and their refugee house guests before the Prior could return with an army, or a starship, or a Plague, or worse.

Bosworth turned his eyes back towards the distant village, squinting, as if that would somehow help him to discern the shapes he knew must have been moving about between the buildings. Nothing. Not a movement, not a blip, not a single reassuring glimpse.

Too many trees.

He thought about raising his gun to his eye; perhaps the carbine's scope might have afforded him some mote of reassurance that his naked eye couldn't find. But that wasn't him, not his style, not his personality. Jake Bosworth was cool. Jake Bosworth was calm. Jake Bosworth took his worries and buried them deep beneath a protective blanket of humour and deflection.

"I feel like we're kinda having a moment here."

Bosworth could feel the clenching of Tolinev's jaw, as if it had somehow affected the gravity in the area. "If we were," she shot back, "You would have just ruined it by opening your mouth." A split second withering scowl hurled itself in his direction. "Again."

It was Bosworth's turn to let a smile stealth its way onto his features. "Again? You think we've had moments before?"

Tolinev's eyes widened. "That is not —"

A crunch of static over both their radios spared Tolinev from finishing her protest, and forced Bosworth to abandon any thoughts of probing deeper. "Thirteen-Niner to Thirteen-Sierra, what's your status? Over."

Colonel David Dixon loitered awkwardly in the doorway of yet another building, watching as yet another family or household searched for the last few precious belongings that they hoped not to leave behind. Moving was an awful experience at the best of times, but at least then you could hire people to dispassionately sling your belongings into boxes, and shove those boxes into the back of a truck. For the people here, they were at the pack what you can carry stage, facing the long trek down the hillside and back up again to the gate, all with the threat of Ori crusaders nipping at their heels. He didn't have the heart to rush a single one of them, and yet found himself with the unenviable obligation of having to.

"Gate is still secure, sir, and I'm pretty sure Tolinev just expressed recognisable human emotions, so our situation's pretty optimal over here. How is the wagon train coming?"

There was a certain something in Bosworth's voice that left Dixon unsure whether he should feel amused or just sorry for the Senior Lieutenant. He decided to opt for annoyed instead; that usually served him well. He abandoned the doorway as he listened, letting himself move within earshot of the airmen loading up an F.R.E.D. with supplies in the street outside. "First group should be ready to start moving in the next few minutes," he replied, to the airmen as much as to Bosworth. "Tolinev, I want you on overwatch as they start heading down the pass. Radio if there are any stragglers, we don't want anyone left behind."

"Copy," Tolinev offered in curt reply, a typical stark contrast to Sergeant Bosworth. Dixon hadn't known what to expect when General O'Neill had made the questionably hypocritical suggestion that he plug a vacancy on his team with the Russian; but anyone who managed to be both Russian and vouched for by Jack O'Neill was certainly worthy of a closer look, and for the most part the decision had paid off. She was competent, professional, and invested almost no energy at all into being a source of frustration for Dixon, that last part elevating her head and shoulders above the rest of his team. Not that there was anything wrong with the rest of his team, each of them had their part to play for better or worse, but sometimes — only sometimes — they managed to make him miss the focused simplicity of running black ops in countries that most folks had never heard of, instead of Stargate ops on planets that most folks had never heard of.

For a brief moment he glanced towards the peak of the mountainside above, and scowled at the sky. Two moons is too many moons.

"Best dial the Beta Site with an update, and start broadcasting to keep the wormhole open. The first group should be with you inside the first thirty-eight minutes, and the last thing we want is the Ori waltzing through while we're strung out and exposed trudging our way over to the gate."

"Roger that, sir." There was a weighty pause before Bosworth's voice crackled over the comm again. "Did you tell Satterfield to pack up her toys yet? You know that's gonna take a while, especially with all the heel-dragging."

Dixon let out a sigh. It might only have happened about as often as a broken clock, but when Bosworth was right, he was right. "On my way to do that now. Dixon out."

A few nods were thrown from green-clothed figures as Dixon trudged his way up the mossy path between the village buildings, the Earthling personnel standing out amongst the mismatched fashions of the village's other occupants. He returned silent the greetings as they were offered, but it was the aliens — was that even the right word? — that held most of his attention. The nomads from Vis Uban were easy to spot, their clothes still boasting the vibrant colours they'd always had, even if they'd adapted from the loose robes of desert life to a style more befitting the cool and frequent damp of forest life. The miners from P4S-237 meanwhile stood out in their rugged, practical clothes, no longer forced to dig up naquadah for one of Ba'al's underwhelming underlings, but seemingly still gravitating towards lives of labour and practicality as far as their new home demanded it. The natives from P3X-367 meanwhile had traded their tattered rags for better tailored clothes in darker colours — as if still in mourning for their lost — but they still seemed to favour the style of the loose hooded robes that had once hidden their Nirrti-deformed physiology, making it look as if a herd of Benedictine monks was shuffling its way around the streets. There were more, too, though harder to pick out and trace back to their origins: more humans from other worlds, brought here as they fled from untold tyranny, now forced to flee from it yet again.

You had to wonder if they were doing the right thing. Not the saving people part: you wouldn't last long in the United States military if you didn't believe in that ever-present obligation to intervene in other cultures and hopefully affect things for the better. It was bringing them here that Dixon questioned: not specifically here, but any of the other worlds like it. As far back as the Tollans and the Nasyans, Stargate Command had been helping to hussle refugees from their homes to safety; but for just as long, they had been turning to other worlds to offer them sanctuary. How many times had the Land of Light, or Edora, or P3X-422 opened their homes, doors, and borders to people in need — and how many times had the Earth herself not done the same? It wasn't a new story: the United States' long and often hypocritical relationship with immigration and refugees stretched back until before the nation even existed. No use expecting asylum for the secret refugees when it was a struggle getting any for the public ones. Hell, since the Alpha Site and Beta Site had come on line, refugees never even made it to Cheyenne Mountain anymore: Stargate Command had set up a whole logistics chain to shuffle people around the galaxy more easily without ever setting a toe upon US soil. At least they did something, Dixon supposed, even if the bill was so deeply buried in the Air Force budget that regular Americans didn't even realise they were footing the bill.

But it wasn't just aid and asylum. The way things had worked out over the few thousand years since folks like this had been plucked from Earth, every planet had mostly become its own little monoculture. Sure, you had some worlds with a few tribes, or maybe a few nations to butt heads with each other if their ancestors had been frisky enough to achieve a big enough population, but just as often if not more it was one lonely village within walking distance of the gate, and then a whole empty planet to themselves. It was like making a cocktail by mixing shots, and hoping the product wouldn't taste like garbage. Could you imagine if the Tollans had actually accepted the invite to P3X-797, the utter carnage that would have caused trying to combine two such disparate societies? Hell, even now, you could barely recognise the Land of Light for what it had once been, all diverse and cosmopolitan and bustling with tourism and trade. Great things came out of mixing a good cocktail, but as delicious as a long island iced tea could be, good luck finding the flavour of the tequila that got lost in the mix. He was no history nerd, but even Dixon couldn't help wondering sometimes if they weren't disturbing some living archaeology that they should have been trying harder to preserve.

He watched as one of the SGC airmen hoisted a young girl in pigtails up onto one of the Field Remote Expeditionary Devices the Beta Site had sent, helping her to get comfortable and secure amid the bags and boxes that represented the lives of her whole neighbourhood. Her arms wrapped vice-like around a crudely-made stuffed animal — some kind of llama, maybe? — that the Airman passed up next. Poor kid was probably terrified, getting perched on top of a strange wagon that moved without horses, forced to leave her home yet again for reasons she was no doubt too young to understand. Something about her reminded him of his youngest, especially the way those blue eyes shone out from a grubby little face that her parents had understandably given up on trying to keep clean at this point. She looked terrified, but she didn't cry, didn't fuss, just clung to that space llama for dear life, and watched the chaos unfold around her. A stray glance drifted in Dixon's direction. He managed to find a smile for her, just for a moment.

Dixon's boots advanced up the path, and finally found the new doorway he was looking for. This far up the mountainside, the air was cool, but within the dark stone of the village buildings, it was cooler still. Light formed strange patterns on the walls as it passed through the intricate geometric mesh that formed the various screens and dividers that littered the room and covered the windows. You didn't need to be an archaeologist to realise that the architecture was Ancient: not the same exact patterns as the Antarctic Outpost, granted, but the Ancients sure did love throwing unnecessary diagonals and random shapes over everything.

He spared a moment of respectful attention for the tangle of metal and shattered crystals that had once been the genetic manipulator that Nirrti used to unravel the local populace, now destroyed by the survivors and left as a shrine to those she had taken. He'd heard both sides of the argument over whether SG-1 should or shouldn't have let the locals make that choice. Dixon was firmly in the break the damn thing camp. Human DNA was a long way from perfect, but best he could tell, every time someone tried to use science magic to heal what ails them, you wound up driven evil by a sarcophagus, or with your immune system nuked by tretonin, or raised back to life as a Honduran jungle zombie. Step away from the box, Pandora, and all that jazz.

Captain Satterfield was not hard to find. The breadcrumb trail of discarded books was the first clue; the hushed and earnest bickering about something that sounded utterly boring was the next. While he wouldn't admit it, out of prudence against the leverage it would have given Satterfield if he did, he understood the importance of her being here, and taking this time. This structure was Ancient, capital A. It had been built by the people who constructed the Stargate, and if the gene-splicer was anything to go by, at a time when they were trying to figure out the whole Ascension to a higher plane of existence thing. It was easy to joke about a race so old that folks called them The Ancients while they were still around, but the Lanteans, or Alterans, or whatever you wanted to call them really did live up to the name. Back in high school history, Dixon remembered learning that by the time Anthony and Cleopatra were doing their thing, the pyramids were already two thousand years old — older than that, even, as Doctor Jackson had figured out. That was a long weekend for the Ancients: they were ancient before the dinosaurs were even around. Even with humans from Earth living in their lost city off in the Pegasus Galaxy, there was still so much to learn about Ancient history, and so damn much history to learn about. Why this structure was here, what it was for, just how ancient it was — all valid questions, all important knowledge, and all damned useful to know before you abandoned it to be overrun by one of your most dangerous enemies. If there was knowledge to be found here, especially if it was the whoosh out of the wall, grab your head, and make you talk weird until you die kind of knowledge, that was worth as many last minutes as anyone could spare.

It wasn't worth dying for, though. That was why Stargate Command put people like Colonel Dixon in charge of their teams, instead of the likes of Satterfield or Jackson. Leave it up to them, and they'd still be deciphering runes or hieroglyphics or pictographs or whatever until well beyond the last minute, and that's when daring rescues from the rest of their team were required, and today just wasn't the day to add any of that to their already overwhelmed dance card.

"You know what I'm here to say," Dixon announced as he entered into the room, loud enough to cut through whatever earnest conversation he'd heard spilling out into the hall.

"I think we're really onto something here, sir," Captain Satterfield replied without even a moment of hesitation, ignoring her commanding officer completely. "Based on the external architecture, and what we've been able to translate so far, we think this structure might be contemporary with the citadel on P3X-972." Satterfield paused out of respect, and habit, correctly recognising the lack of recognition in Dixon's eyes that she already knew would be there. "Heliopolis. The meeting place for the Alliance of Four Great Races that Ernest Littlefield discovered when he was accidentally sent through the gate in the Forties."

Dixon unpacked his best disapproving parent face, the full severity of it slightly diminished as his eyebrows disappeared under the edge of his helmet. "The part where I care, Captain."

Satterfield's head bobbed from side to side for a few swift moments, mentally fast forwarding through the version of this conversation that she'd been rehearsing in her head for the last few minutes, ready just in case the Colonel had one of his rare moments of free time and curiosity. "Heliopolis had a device that used atomic structure as the basis of a universal language. We only know a small fraction of what the device contained, thanks to Doctor Littlefield's notes, and until now that's as much as we've been able to get: by the time we had the ability to travel to 972 by ship, the structure had already collapsed and fallen into the ocean."

"Perhaps if the Tau'ri had informed us of this location sooner," someone chimed in from off to Dixon's left, the strange distortion on the voice allowing Dixon to identify Korra the Tok'ra without needing to turn and look, "We might have been able to recover the device before all was lost."

"In which case we'd still know pretty much nothing," Dixon calmly shot back, his remark as offhand as it was scathing, "What with the Tok'ra's excellent track record of sharing information."

Korra's face split into a grin, taking full advantage of the casual air of the comfortable lean his host had chosen to adopt. It had not been the first exchange of barbs between the Tok'ra and the Colonel, and as far as Korra was concerned, it would hopefully not been the last. Captain Satterfield had compared it to something from her homeworld called ‘tennis', and while Korra, his host, and Doctor Zenna Valk had been equally unaware of what on Earth — a delightful Tau'ri phrase, and one that felt decidedly apt in the moment — Captain Satterfield was trying to convey, the fact that she likened it to a game or sport fit with Korra's sensibilities precisely. He only hoped that the Colonel was enjoying it as much as he was.

"What we're seeing," Satterfield interjected, quick to head off another volley of the tedious tennis-style back and forth that Dixon and Korra had been torturing her with ever since the two had met back at the Beta Site, "Is what seems to be a crude two-dimensional version of that same concept. It might be a precursor, or just a less tech-intensive alternative form, but that doesn't matter. That's not the cool part."

A look was cast between Satterfield and one of the other figures in the room. "I believe," Zenna Valk offered, taking a short step forward towards the Colonel, "This is the point at which Captain Satterfield would like me to dramatically reveal that this passage —" Her hand waved towards a particular section of the stone wall beside her, covered in lines, circles, and other strange flourishes that Dixon found utterly incomprehensible. "- talks about a race of beings called the Furlings."

"The Furlings?" Dixon's dry and deadpan reaction didn't miss a beat. "No effing way."

Satterfield was too busy beaming at him to give Dixon's letter-based pun the respect and attention it deserved. "The Furlings, sir. The missing race, the most mysterious of Stargate mysteries. Up until now, all we've had are references, and one definite example of their technology. The rest is just speculation and guesswork. But if we can decipher the rest of this wall, or maybe one of the others, somewhere in this complex, there has got to be —"

The archaeologist's tripping and stumbling words were cut off by the two words she new would be coming, and yet desperately hoped the Colonel would not ask.

"Gate address?"

Satterfield somehow became two inches shorter, her bright and eager eyes falling away to stare at the floor instead of her commander. Dixon cast his own gaze around the rest of the room, seeking out whoever was going to give him the answer that he already knew, and yet needed the nerd squad to go through the process of speaking it aloud. It was Zenna Valk who volunteered herself.

"Nothing we have found resembles anything like a Stargate address, as far as we can tell."

"Nothing we have found so far," Satterfield clarified, with a hint of bitterness.

Dixon fixed her with a look. "So you take as much video as you can, and you figure out the rest of the translation once we get back home. And if you're quick about it and don't argue —" He jumped in fast to cut off an interruption before it escaped Satterfield's half open mouth. "— I'll ask Colonel Mitchell to order Daniel to help you out. I'll even throw in lunch."

Satterfield's ears flushed at the mention of Daniel Jackson, squirming both at the feeling of her once-crush being used against her, and at the knowledge that it had been Jack O'Neill himself who'd furnished her commanding officer with that piece of information, meaning that Doctor Jackson most certainly knew about it as well. But as much as it made her want to curl up and implode into an atom-sized singularity of non-perception, she soldiered through, not ready to let go of this particular cause just yet.

"So much of this language relies on position and context, sir. Short of getting a scanning crew in here so that we can construct a full 3D replica —"

The last remaining figure in the room took a step forward, not towards Dixon, but towards Satterfield. A hand placed itself on Satterfield's right shoulder, and for a moment Dixon watched the single visible eye of Eggar stare through him rather than at him. Dixon recognised him in an instant: his scarred features were hard to mistake, and his capabilities had been a prominent part of this mission's security briefing. Only one of the natives of P3X-367 still bore the after-effects of Nirrti's experimentation: the one whose telepathy had allowed him to rip the knowledge of the gene-splicer's workings from her dying mind, and thus the only person who had been able to use that knowledge to heal his people — but not himself. Perhaps in time, the Tau'ri could have learned to use the device, and freed him from his disfigurement, but Eggar chose otherwise. The machine was too dangerous, and had done too much harm. To his good fortune, Eggar had not suffered the same fate as Alabran or Colonel Evanov: perhaps his ability had been deemed valuable enough that Nirrti had left him in stable condition for later study. To look at the man, though, and see the obvious burden that weighed upon every inch of him, Dixon couldn't help wondering if maybe he'd have preferred it if his sacrifice had been swift and final, rather than enduring.

Dixon made a point not to resist, and soon began to hear his own thoughts given paraphrased voice by Eggar as he spoke. "Your Colonel would like nothing more than to indulge your obvious enthusiasm, Captain Satterfield. But if we delay much longer, death certainly awaits, and he will not allow that to befall you under any circumstances."

The hand fell away, and Eggar drew backwards, Dixon offering him a silent nod of thanks. Satterfield joined in with a resigned nod of her own. "Give us ten minutes, sir."

The resignation in Satterfield's voice was like a knife in Dixon's heart. As a commanding officer, you always wanted your team to follow orders, but you never wanted to see it look like surrender. Pretending for a moment that Satterfield hadn't yet again reminded him of another of his kids, he forced his voice back into business mode. "You can have fifteen. But even one second longer, and I will have you zatted and carried out."

A flicker of a smile found Satterfield's features. "Yes, sir."

A grunt escaped Captain Carl Grogan as he heaved one last hefty wooden trunk onto the back of the idling F.R.E.D. All manner of notions about this not being what he signed up for floated through his head, but this wasn't what any of them had signed up for, the people of this village least of all. No one joined the military — or the Stargate Program — expecting to get muddy and sweaty lugging furniture around on some tree-infested hillside; you signed up to shoot guns, fly planes, fight the bad guys, and go on cool adventures to exciting alien worlds. But sometimes this was the mission. Not just a mission either, the mission. Saving people and fighting the bad guys was exactly what they were doing. Every person they managed to get through the gate was one less person the Ori could conquer, one less worshipper they could convert, one less victim they could kill. Boil it down to the basics, and everyone joined the military to do just one thing: save lives.

Grogan slapped a hand against the side of the F.R.E.D., and a few moments later the Airman with the radio controls jerked the lumbering mechanical beast into motion, motors whirring as it trundle-jerked its way across the uneven path. Grogan allowed himself a moment to catch his breath, hands on hips, surveying the progress. Alongside SG-13's supervision, about half a dozen bodies from his security detail and a few additional volunteers had gated in from the Beta Site to help with the evacuation. Things were going briskly, but unhurried: SFs were focused on loading the villagers and their belongings into convoys that would make the trek across the valley to the gate, while technicians were dismantling what infrastructure they could to be repurposed at the other end. Part of it was in the spirit of denying anything useful to the Ori, but mostly it was simple practicality: practised as the Beta Site was in welcoming floods of new arrivals, especially these days, the more anyone could bring with them, the more comfortable their stay would be.

He took a step backwards to allow a little more elbow room for one of the technicians as they jogged past, naquadah generator in hand. 367 hadn't had much in the way of technology when Stargate Command had first encountered them, but a few modern perks had seemed like the least they could do when Earth started asking them to host refugees. Electric lights, basic plumbing and water filtration, weather equipment, radios to keep in touch — nothing that might overturn their entire way of life, but enough to ensure they could continue to live it in reasonable health and comfort. Lieutenant Fischer had likened it to something called ‘glamping', though Grogan wasn't entirely sure he knew what that word was supposed to mean.

The emergence of Colonel Dixon from the village's central building caught his attention, and Grogan set off across the way to make sure he fell into step beside, a status report already on his lips before Dixon even had to ask for it.

"First group is ready to go, sir. Not sure there's anything to be gained by them waiting around taking up space."

Dixon nodded his head in curt agreement. "My guys at the gate are already on the lookout, and Beta should be warned and waiting by the time you get there. Let's get these people moving."

Grogan didn't wait for further permission. Turning on his heel, a shrill whistle snagged the attention of Lieutenant Fischer from across the gathering of once-again refugees. A hand cranked above his head, gesturing to round everyone up and get things rolling. It was all the instruction the Lieutenant required, springing into action and ushering the convoy into motion before Grogan had even managed to lag more than a few quick steps behind the Colonel. He caught back up in easy strides.

"We should probably spread ourselves out through the convoy, sir. Better odds of making a meaningful difference if things end up going sideways for these people on the way to the gate."

Dixon nodded wordlessly at the suggestion, not bothering to glance in the direction of the man who'd spoken, his attention instead finding the owners of the home he'd been peering into earlier, beginning the slow trudge down the hillside away from the home they had made for themselves. He tried to remember what that was like, that true, agonising feeling of tearing yourself away from a genuine home. It was something that military life made sure you became numb to: Dixon had moved away from many homes, and left on deployment even more often. Home was just a technical term for where most of your stuff was. That feeling of home, though, the deeper meaning of it, that transferred onto people instead. Home was his wife. Home was his kids. But home was also Stargate Command. Home was SG-13, and alien vistas that always seemed so strangely familiar. Dixon had no shortage of places where he felt at home.

These people didn't have that luxury, and so he forced himself to remember the times when leaving truly had hurt. Moving away from his parents that first time. That first deployment knowing he was about to become a father; that first one being a father, and becoming one again, and again, and again. Helping clear out Nana Dixon's home after the funeral, taking all those childhood memories and deciding which ones were trash and which ones would wind up in boxes, buried in the attic until one of those moves gave an opportunity to sift through them once again. It wasn't the same. Leaving wasn't the same as losing. But he found that hurt within him anyway, and clung to it for the sake of what these people were going through.

"Right you are, Captain. You go ahead and follow along with the next group, I'll stay here and make sure all the I's are crossed and T's are dotted. Is my mission, after all."

Something shifted in the demeanour of Captain Grogan. "Which is why you should probably head along with the next group, sir, rather than me. You're a Colonel, not a chaperone — leave the clean-up to the hired help, that's what we're here for."

Dixon allowed a beat of silence to fall before he countered. "Want to try that again without it sounding like a BS excuse, Captain?"

Grogan shrank a little, retreating into the protective shell of his olive BDU's. "I just —" His voice faltered as he tried to usher the explanation out, and mentally he cursed himself for how informal he'd almost sounded. "I feel a lot better when I'm the last man out, sir. Easier to see that everyone made it out okay if you're bringing up the rear."

There was more to it than that, but Dixon didn't need the Captain to fill in the blanks for him. They'd both been around Stargate Command long enough for Dixon to understand what was being left unsaid: Grogan was a Sole Survivor, one of an unlucky exclusive club at the SGC who'd managed to make it back alive when the rest of their team weren't so lucky. For Grogan, it had been Latona, if memory served. Simple planet, fancy defenses, almost got screwed up because the NID messed with something they shouldn't have during their little offworld larceny campaign. Plenty of folks to share the blame between, but not a slice of it falling on Grogan's shoulders. But that didn't matter, did it? Responsible or not, guilt found you just the same.

"Alright," Dixon replied, throwing in a faux sigh of frustration to cover up just how much context he'd found between the Captain's words. "I gave Satterfield —" He tugged back on the sleeve of his jacket, and peered at his watch. "— twelve more minutes for nerd stuff." He shot Grogan a rueful look. "This had better not have been some scam you two cooked up to buy her extra time."

A few pounds of weight seemed to shrug off Grogan's shoulders. "Don't worry, sir. If Satterfield gives me any trouble, I'll just zat her and carry her back to the gate. Wouldn't be the first time."

A small, lopsided grin danced across Dixon's jaw for just a moment. "I knew there was a reason I liked you, Grogan."

"— and that is how The Dog learned the hard way that dancing monkeys are not to be trusted."

Lieutenant Fischer had faced a lot of challenges during his time at the SGC, but today was a particular struggle. Ever since P2X-885, ever since that Prior had tapped him on the shoulder and made him patient zero for a plague that had claimed more lives than he could bear to count, every step through that event horizon had been a quest for atonement. Every life he helped to save made that impossible number feel a little bit smaller. With enough time, perhaps the guilt clenched around his heart like a vice would begin to feel a little smaller as well. That was his hope, at least; and all he could do was hope.

It was true that their mission here to 367 was all about saving lives. An hour from now, two tops, they'd have the population of this world safe and mostly comfortable back on the Beta Site. Column B on his spreadsheet of lives lost and lives saved would fill up that little bit more. In his head, he knew what was happening. But his heart wasn't hearing it, wasn't feeling it. They hadn't done anything, not really, just shown up and dragged these people from their homes. They were in danger, no doubt about that. As soon as they'd sent word to Beta that a Prior had visited their world, this had been the only option and the clock had begun to count down. But Fischer, Grogan, the airmen and volunteers from Beta, SG-13? They were just escorts. Removal men at most. A necessary task, but it didn't exactly make it feel like he shouldn't be doing more.

Worse was Shamda. The old man was nice enough, but this was the seventh story he had orated from his perch atop the F.R.E.D. that Fischer was herding, and the fables were beginning to blur together. He'd tried to pay attention at first, and initially it had seemed like that attention might be rewarded: Shamda had started talking about birds of a feather, and for a fleeting moment Fischer thought he might be about to gain insight into that idiom that he'd so often heard, but never really thought about. What he'd heard instead seemed to be some sort of hatchet job approximation that the old man must have picked up from one of the SGC airmen he'd interacted with — either that, or the similarities between the fable characters and the cast of the Simpsons must have been some kind of weird cosmic coincidence.

By story seven though, things were really starting to drag on. Fischer's mind drifted for a moment to an anecdote he'd once heard, about a native tribe or people somewhere on Earth who measured the length of a journey in the number of stories it would take to pass the time. Another thing the Goa'uld had stolen from Earth along with everything else, he supposed.

One of the other nomads — Khordib, if he remembered right — adjusted his pace to draw alongside Fischer. "I am afraid he talks often when he is nervous," he offered in a low tone, a flicker of apology gracing his features.

"He seems very nervous," Fischer countered, with a hint of a grunt.

"As are we all."

Fischer winced internally as his reflexive retort landed itself squarely on a nerve. Khordib managed to find him a reassuring smile nonetheless. "But less so thanks to your presence."

Fischer felt the temperature increase inside his BDUs, and rebuked himself for the callous arithmetic he'd framed their mission with. The folks here on 367 were people, not just numbers. The lives they endeavoured to save were lives, not statistics. You couldn't quantify that kind of good, no matter how much they might try to back in DC. The right thing was the right thing, and it was always worth doing.

Of course, the bitter other side was that those lost to the Prior plague were actual people and actual lives as well, and no amount of goodwill and good action could ever bring that loss back to the universe. If one couldn't atone then, if there was no redeeming what had been done, then perhaps that made this penance, and if so, perhaps his discomfort was required.

"So what you're saying," Fischer said, speaking up, wilfully throwing himself on the pyre that this mission had constructed for his torment, "Is to be mindful of why they're dancing. Not all monkeys dance with good intentions, and if you allow yourself to be distracted by it, who knows what it might cost you."

"Yes!" Shamda's eyes visibly brightened. "The Dog lost what was precious to him, because the Monkeys danced with deceit in their hearts." His expression shifted into a scowl. "Why could you not be this attentive a student, Khordib?"

Whatever Khordib's response, Fischer didn't get the opportunity to hear it; nor did Shamda, for that matter. Instead, their conversation was shattered by a sound like distant thunder, but not quite: a different, equally distinctive sound, of air being torn by something moving too damned fast, echoing its way along the valley.

Sonic boom.

Fischer was in motion before before the thought fully even crystalised, peeling away from the F.R.E.D. and breaking into a careful run as he raced towards another of the jerky remote vehicles a few dozen yards back. "Rophi!" formed as a shout on his lips, but it didn't even need to escape before the man in his sights sprung into action, unlashing a long distinctive case from the pile of military supplies. Wordlessly the case was set down, and fastenings were unlatched, the surface-to-air launcher turned and presented towards Fischer. Of all the volunteers that the Colonel agreed to let pitch in around the Beta Site, Rophiapgisy was perhaps the most useful. Scuttlebutt was that he'd been trained in Earth tactics and culture by Apophis back in the day, as part of some elaborate infiltration plan. Truth be told, Fischer hadn't paid it much mind, and didn't have the inclination to pry: if Command had cleared him, and the guy wanted to help, that was all Fischer needed to know. Besides, Fischer was hardly about to start wasting suspicion on a man who was switched on enough to hand you a rocket launcher without you needing to ask.

Hefting the launcher from its crate, Fischer heard the skittering of rocks as Colonel Dixon scampered his way down the crude path to his side, but paid him no mind, not even reacting to the barked "Report!" that his superior uttered, his intention instead focused on the scope of the weapon now set in place on his shoulder, one eye closed as he peered through the reticule into the sky above.

"Three Ori fighters."

It was as much of a response as Dixon got, uttered as much to clear the breath from Fischer's lungs as anything else. A steady hand guided the weapon in anticipation of the left-most craft, infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths conspiring to provide the device with a steady lock. A finger pulled back gently, calmly on the trigger, and a naquadah-enhanced projectile hurled itself from the sealed barrel, a trail of smoke and vapour spiralling after it as it raced across the distance towards its target. As it struck, an explosion ripped across the edge of the ship, and it suddenly began to plummet, tumbling from the air and towards the welcoming embrace of the tree-covered hillside below.

"Two Ori fighters," Fischer corrected, letting the launcher — now spent — slide from his shoulder. He glanced in Dixon's direction, but his attention was caught instead by the streak of another missile launch, this time from further up the hillside to his left. A slight smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he guessed at who was behind the trigger, but faded as the central craft in the formation — one pregnant with the bulky underslung weight of a deployable Ori ring platform — slammed on its reverse thrust at the very last second, dropping out of the second Stinger's path so that it would collide with its wingmate instead.

Fischer imagined the curse words that must have been tumbling out of Captain Grogan's mouth, and almost joined in with a few of his own as the surviving Ori fighter throttled up again, its engines screaming as it shot overhead, and unleashed its payload like a bomb into the trees beyond.

"That forest is about to get awful busy awful fast," Fischer grumbled, stating the obvious.

Dixon's demeanour seemed to match. "Get these people moving," he barked, already fidgeting with the strap that held his weapon close to his body, already in motion towards the back of the convoy. "We'll buy them as much time as we can."

"Пиздец," Bosworth hissed under his breath, something he didn't quite understand the meaning of, but had heard Tolinev unleash in situations like this enough times to get the gist. Watching two Ori fighters tumble from the sky and make the forest a little bit less of a forest was a satisfying sight on many levels; watching it dump down a set of transport rings a few hundred yards from the convoy's path was somewhat less so.

Dixon would have orders, but that didn't mean Bosworth couldn't start doing the smart thing before then. His hand grabbed for the radio on his chest, and while he knew it wouldn't make the damnedest bit of difference, he still turned himself to address the open Stargate that his signal was about to beam through.

"Beta Site, this is SG-Thirteen-Sierra: we have Ori hostiles arriving by air, currently only one bandit still active, but rings are deployed and we can expect reinforcements from orbit —"

His voice faltered as a matter stream lanced down from the heavens like a bolt of arcane lightning, the pulse of energy running its length heralding the deployment of the first wave of ground forces.

"Scratch that, Beta Site. Ground forces confirmed. Refugees are inbound, but a leisurely pace is no longer an option."

A reply crunched its way across several billion miles of wormhole and out of the speaker strapped to Bosworth's chest. "Beta copies, Thirteen-Sierra. You get those people through that gate, we'll handle everything else on our end."

"Understood, Beta. First arrivals in —" His attention shifted back to the path, and the distant figures trying their hardest to expediently trudge their way up the steep slope. "— around three minutes."

Bosworth's hand fell away from the radio, and he advanced a few steps towards Tolinev, already prone and staring through the scope of her rifle. "I'm going to see if I can help these folks up this last stretch of hill. Shoot the bad guys before they get the chance to shoot me, yeah?"

Tolinev's reply came in the form of an earth-shattering crack, a hunk of metal hurling itself down the hillside at imperceptible speed, a distant armour-clad shape in the treeline collapsing in the distance. Her attention not shifting, her hand slid back the action on the rifle, a hot spent bronze casing launching itself from the breech and landing close to Bosworth's boots. "Da," was all she uttered, as she slid the next round into place.

Half a second's pause was all Bosworth allowed himself, before he was off in staggered steps down the hill, muttering something about high temperatures that definitely related to the hot shell casing and had absolutely nothing to do with any stoic Russians. Any thoughts that might have accompanied those words were left in his wake, replaced instead with a steely focus as he dodged around the two figures at the forefront of the arriving refugees, a young woman and an older man leaning some of his struggling weight on her shoulder. Bosworth slipped into position as her mirror, and the man didn't protest in the slightest as Bosworth shouldered his way under the man's other arm. "Don't worry, we've got you," he uttered, a sentiment for them individually and in general for anyone in earshot. "I'm Jake, by the way," he added, solidifying the friendly air his voice carried despite the circumstances.

"Natania," the woman replied. "This is my father Ellori."

Ellori. One of the settlement's leaders, if Bosworth remembered the mission brief correctly. That was good: an authority figure, someone the other refugees would listen to, someone who could help offer a little calm to the chaos that was about to greet them on the other side of the gate.

"Okay, Ellori. Let's get you up this hill."

Shouldering as much of the man's weight as he could, and assisted more than he had expected by Natania — these people used to be miners, his mind helpfully offered — Bosworth quickened the pace, and comfortably inside his three-minute estimate the trio made up the slope and to the brink of the Stargate.

"Things are going to be a little crazy when you step through that wormhole," Bosworth explained, trying to maintain his reassuring tone as best he could. "There's going to be a lot of soldiers hustling about getting ready to make sure that only the good guys end up on that side of the gate. You are safe, you are fine, but you are going to have to listen to every instruction that gets yelled at you —" His attention focused on Ellori, but his tone expanded to include Natania as well. "— and I'm going to need you to help guide your people to where they need to go."

Ellori nodded resolutely; with the hillside now behind him, he straightened himself up to stand a little taller, unaided by the younger figures at his sides. "We have been preparing for this for many days. We will do what we must."

With that, the village elder stepped forward, but his daughter lagged behind. "I will be right behind you," she assured, but it was Bosworth's protest rather than her father's that she turned to immediately preempt. "You cannot protect us and usher us through the Stargate at the same time. Let us each do the tasks for which we are best suited."

Bosworth held her gaze for a moment, but it was clear that there was no give in Natania's resolve, and they hardly had the time for Bosworth to create any. "Alright. But you stay behind me, and if I tell you to get through that gate, you go without hesitation. Clear?"

Natania nodded her understanding, and planted a kiss on her father's cheek. To his credit, the elder man didn't protest: too wise to try and alter his daughter's mind once it was set, perhaps. "Follow swiftly," was all he offered, with the kind of soft weight that belied far more subtext to those words than a stranger could readily guess, and then took a few steps back, disappearing into the event horizon.

Bosworth allowed her a brief moment, but that was all they can spare. "You're the one who killed Mot, right?" Natania wrenched her eyes away from the wormhole, and answered with a nod. Bosworth reached for his hip, tugging out the beretta holstered there, and handed it towards her. "Then you'll know how to use this. Please don't make me look bad by using it to shoot me."

A flicker of a smile and a nervous but earnest nod came in reply, and without even waiting for Bosworth to instruct her to do so, Natania dropped into a half-crouch behind the cover of the DHD, beckoning for those who'd been lagging behind to hurry in her direction.

Bosworth took his cue, raising his voice and his weapon as he advanced back down the hillside once more. "Okay people, let's hustle up! Up the hill, through the gate, move, move, move!"

"I'm just saying: it was an asshole move," Grogan grumbled, not allowing his annoyance at the Ori ship which had evaded his attempts to shoot it down to slow him down as he jogged as fast as his feet and physics would allow him to, down the rough earth road from the village. "Had him dead to rights, and then he just pulls some cheap stunt —"

Satterfield fought against a tight gallows smile as Grogan's complaint trailed off. "Want me to radio the Ori and tell them you want a do-over?"

"Ha-ha," Grogan threw back, punctuating the separate syllables, aiming his response over the civilians that Satterfield and he had strung out between them. As per the demands of his psyche, he had waited until the absolute last before departing the village. Lucky, too: if they'd left any sooner he'd be down in the thick of the treeline, and wouldn't have had a clear enough angle to launch a Stinger at the approaching Ori ships. Or maybe he would have, as they passed overhead, and perhaps that would have prevented the ring-carrying Ori fighter from pulling its last minute evasives; but it was a moot point now, hindsight best saved for the inevitable insomnia-fuelled after-action analysis once he was safely back in his bunk.

"I thought the Ori were not to return until tomorrow," Zenna Valk spoke up, her voice suggesting that she was — understandably — the most rattled of the final five to depart the village.

"They were not," Eggar confirmed grimly, from close by Zenna's side. Grogan had watched the way that his pace had subtly shifted, keeping him close by the Pangaran's side as if he could sense her unease and wanted to offer whatever unspoken reassurance he could. Perhaps that was exactly what was happening, come to think of it, but now hardly seemed like the time to dwell on the man's purported psychic powers. "The Prior was quite clear: he would return in seven days. It has only been a little more than five."

"Perhaps the Ori homeworld does not rotate at the same rate as yours," Korra the Tok'ra offered; if Zenna was the most anxious of the group, Korra seemed the least phased, almost as if he had managed to find some small mote of enjoyment in all this. Grogan recognised it, that flicker of thrill when someone found themselves back in action for the first time in too long; perhaps Korra had been doing the Tok'ra equivalent of riding a desk, or had spent too long embedded in the court of some last-surviving System Lord without the freedom to openly act against his enemies. Then again, maybe the man was just weird.

"Or perhaps the Ori knew when we were leaving, and figured they'd strike when we were most vulnerable." Satterfield offered her thoughts with a surprising calm, her concentration too fixed on watching her footing and watching the treeline to leave any room for nerves. It was quite the change from the Lieutenant that Grogan remembered when they'd first met, but the good kind of change, the growth kind. A lot had changed for the both of them in the last four years or so, and neither of them had made Captain purely by riding out their time in service. "After all, they are Ascended beings. Who knows what the all-seeing eyes in the sky have been whispering to the Priors."

"Yeah, or maybe someone a little more terrestrial tipped them off," Grogan grunted back. He'd meant terrestrial as an opposite to Ascended, but given his present company, he winced a little at the thought that he might have just accidentally been offensive. "The Ori have some pretty enticing offers, and there's whole planets out there getting swayed by it, let alone individual hearts and minds."

Korra quirked an eyebrow. "You suspect espionage?"

"It happens. They may be false gods like the Goa'uld, but we've seen plenty of people struggle to let go of those beliefs. Don't necessarily have a frame of reference myself, but I'm sure if someone came along and challenged my fundamentals, I wouldn't necessarily be able to change my mind with the snap of a finger." Grogan shrugged, even though none of the people in front of him would see it. "Call me paranoid, but I'd rather rule out the mere mortal explanations before I start entertaining the divine ones."

"You're paranoid," Satterfield shot back immediately, though the joking retort didn't quite succeed in dislodging the grim implications that worried her brow.

Zenna's comment was equally sombre. "But not necessarily incorrect."

"We should inspect the belongings of the refugees once we return to the Beta Site. Perhaps we will discover —"

Korra's words were cut off as Satterfield raised her fist for silence. The group halted, and just as quickly scampered for the nearest cover: a few trees, a fallen log, precious little else. An eerie quiet fell and a few tense moments passed, until suddenly from the trees erupted a shrieking burst of cerulean fire, hurtling perilously close to where Grogan's chest should have been. Luckily he managed to dive to the side just in time. As he slumped into the undergrowth, three Ori soldiers surged out into view: one quickly felled by the staccato rattle of Satterfield's P90, another struck by two quick-fire waves of zat'nik'tel energy from Korra.

The third froze, paralysed in place by what at first seemed like fear: but soon it evolved: fear not the cause of the paralysis, but rather a symptom of it. The Ori soldier's eyes grew wide, and picking himself out of the brush, Grogan stared in equal surprise, before understanding dawned and he raised his weapon to fire off a single shot. As the bullet struck the Ori guard between helmet and breastplate, Grogan watched as Eggar relaxed and staggered, his outstretched arm falling back to his side. A few panted breaths later, he turned his one good eye towards the now kneeling Grogan. "Thank you," was the Captain's slightly confused reply.

Eggar nodded. "I would prefer," he struggled out between laboured breaths, "To not do that too frequently." The next few breaths seemed considerably more controlled, and Grogan thought he could see something almost Jaffa in whatever techniques the hok'tar was employing. "A scouting party. Most of their company heads for the convoy and the Stargate. His mind contained only his own orders, however: I know not if the Ori plan to send additional men."

"Let's assume that they do," Grogan replied, trying his best to take the concept of telepathic intel in stride. His hand grabbed for his radio. "Colonel, you have incoming. We've taken out three stragglers, but you have approximately —" He glanced in Eggar's direction, receiving a number wordlessly mouthed in reply. "— fifteen hostiles headed your way."

"Thanks for the warning!" Dixon yelled back over the steady rhythm of Tau'ri gunfire ringing out from all directions, back pressed against the makeshift and hardly built-for-purpose cover that an F.R.E.D. was currently providing. He paused for a moment, collecting his breath, counting the whine of staff blasts coming from the Ori soldiers' sleeker, pointier staff weapons. One. Two. Three.

Quickly he shifted from cover, rising into a crouch with his M4 ready to fire. Two rapid bursts of fire felled the first two visible soldiers, the next barely missing a third as he dodged between the trees. One last mental snapshot of the battlefield and he was back behind cover, processing what he had seen. The Ori soldiers were predictable. Simple tactics, set firing patterns, like a bunch of amateurs at a Civil War reenactment. No surprises really, when you considered that the Ori Army was hastily thrown together from whatever able bodies they could find, trained in a year or less to fight in an entirely different galaxy. An elite force of born-for-battle Jaffa they were not, and that was perhaps the only reason that things were still — slightly — leaning in SG-13's favour. For now, they seemed to have the Ori vanguard boxed in, and if Grogan was right they'd reduced them by more than half — but that would only last until the next skybeam of reinforcements from the mothership in orbit.

Dixon offered a wordless nod to Sergeant James, the SF who this particular F.R.E.D. was programmed to autonomously follow. Thank god that functionality had an off-switch; but handy as a stationary barrier had been for the last few minutes, they wouldn't get anywhere staying put. Carefully, James tugged the remote from inside one of the myriad pockets on his tac vest, and keyed the F.R.E.D. back into active motion. Keeping low, the Sergeant shuffled along behind the once again mobile barrier, and Dixon kept pace, peeking between the assorted boxes and bundles mounded atop its frame. Some of it would have taken damage. Some beloved heirlooms or important comforts in need of repair or replacing. Better them than any of the people that owned them.

Turning his eyes up the path, Dixon noted that the rest of the convoy seemed to have gained some ground. They had been moving off in stages, one F.R.E.D. at a time, families and farmers cowering for cover behind them as they moved. The Ori soldiers seemed content to let them go, concentrating on the Earthlings shooting back rather than the harmless civilians trying to flee. Small mercies, or perhaps some faint shred of honour. Not that the Ori Army displayed all that much of that: they were more of an extermination first, ethics later bunch. Not surprising when you looked upon your enemies as heretics needing to be purged from the galaxy, Dixon supposed. A glance in the other direction, and he saw all that remained: his current moving cover, and two more behind it. Close enough to last to consider making a break for it under normal circumstances, but while the remaining Earthlings could probably outpace the Ori and retreat their way to the Stargate, the two families the next F.R.E.D. over was shielding might not fare so well.

Movement in the distance beyond them had Dixon reaching for his radio. "Cross," he called into it, addressing one of the Beta Site's marines who was holding position behind the third F.R.E.D., "That our archeologists?"

"Most of them, sir," the Lieutenant offered back, with an undertone that made it clear she was just as interested in learning the answer to his next question as he was. Dixon almost allowed himself to feel a moment of relief, were it not for the lack of green uniforms in amongst the distant figures. Either that meant the worst, or —

The sound of gunfire beyond the treeline provided Dixon with the alternative explanation, accompanied by two well-timed explosions. The Ori soldiers yelled and scrambled, suddenly forced to react to being outflanked; Crown at the furthest F.R.E.D., and Woeste at the one between, opened up with a volley of their own to exploit the sudden turn. A few more stray bullets, and everything fell silent. A moment later, Grogan and Satterfield stepped out of the trees.

Dixon stepped around Sergeant James, ushering him to keep moving, before dodging through the convoy towards the latecomers. Woeste and Crown needed no prompting, ushering their own clusters of civilians and cargo into motion as well. Satterfield's eyes scrunched the way they always did when she was preparing to offer up an excuse. "You two get lost?" Dixon asked, perhaps not the most pressing question, but the first in his queue.

"Something like that," Grogan replied, his attention still on the treeline, watching their backs as the last of the refugees began to briskly roll past.

A brief reprieve then. A moment for a breath. Maybe a hint of a wry smile. "Romantic walk in the woods?"

Grogan seemed slightly flustered by the suggestion. Satterfield just grinned. "He wishes, sir."

Moment over. Dixon's face settled back to business. "That all of them?"

"Best we can tell," Grogan agreed, eyes climbing past the treeline to the sky above it, just waiting for the next matter stream from the ship above. If he squinted, he could almost convince himself that he could see it, that front-heavy ellipse, stark white looming faintly at him through the crisp blue sky. "But there's definitely more where they came from."

"Maybe they thought eighteen soldiers was all they needed?" Satterfield offered, hopefully.

"Let's not wait to find out," Dixon gruffed back, allowing himself one last look around their temporary choke point before falling into step beside the last F.R.E.D.

Soldiers were supposed to be guarded about their emotions. Professional. Composed. Bosworth didn't hide a single shred of his relief as Colonel Dixon and Captain Satterfield trudged the last few strides up the slope to the Stargate. P3X-367 had become eerie as soon as the guns had fallen silent: no reinforcements, no nothing. The sole surviving Ori fighter had buzzed the valley once more, the scream of its engines fraying Bosworth's nerves almost completely, but no more than that. A more foolish man might have said it felt too easy, but Bosworth knew better than that. There was another shoe waiting to drop, and right now he was trying desperately to peer his way past the proverbial tree and see whatever the forest had in store.

"We got everyone through," Bosworth replied to the question Dixon wasn't even given the opportunity to ask, a hand settling on the shoulder of Natania for extra emphasis on that we. He winced slightly, already feeling the regret before he even asked: "Any idea why there aren't more zealots chasing us?"

Dixon shook his head, but not with the full force of a dismissal, the gesture waylaid by the weight of thoughts rattling through his mind. "Something's hinky here, Sergeant. Bugs the hell out of me that I can't figure out what."

"Hinky, sir?" Bosworth asked with a quirked eyebrow, but Grogan interrupted before the Colonel was allowed to defend his choice of words.

Brow heavily furrowed, Grogan watched as the faint outline of the Ori mothership deformed in the sky above him. It took three whole heartbeats to comprehend that the shape wasn't changing, just adjusting its orientation. The colour drained from Grogan's face. "Through the gate!" he yelled, turning rapidly on his heel.

"Captain?" Dixon queried, but the sight of Grogan launching himself into a run made him abandon any thought of following up on that last question.

"Through the damn gate!"

Through the vast windows of the mothership control room, the Prior stared out at the world below. It looked so much like the worlds of the home galaxy, the fields in which the Priors tended to the Ori's flock, but that natural beauty hid the rot and corruption that lurked beneath. His one eye found the structure, a vile web amongst the trees, a haven built by those earliest of heretics. The Alterans. The Others. Those who had challenged the word of Origin before human hearts had first begun to beat. They, who had shielded this galaxy from the eyes of the Ori for so long. They, who had allowed it to fester into the swamp of unfettered sin it had become. They, whose Stargates had first brought the light of Origin to these shores. They, whose bitter influence would be seared from the tainted surface below.

His head turned, only slightly, to acknowledge the arrival of a figure behind him. "Our men have fallen," the Commander spoke, "But more stand ready to chase down the non-believers."

The Prior's attention returned to the planet. "No."

Beneath his helmet, the Commander's brow furrowed. "The Stargate is open to them. They will escape —"

"They will bear witness," the Prior countered, forcefully enough to spur the Commander into silence. "Let them flee. There is no place in this galaxy where the light will not eventually find them. But before it does, let them watch as we carve from existence this monument to their so-called Ancients. Let their eyes be opened: nothing can stand against Origin forever."

"Hallowed are the Ori," the Commander whispered, head bowed in the appropriate reverence.

The Prior's eyes closed, and from deep within the bowels of the ship — deep within himself — he conjured the righteous cleansing light that the Ori had bestowed upon him within this vessel. A beam of pure radiance lanced out from beneath the window before him, judgement passed upon the unholy sanctum that the Alterans had left behind.

"Hallowed are the Ori," the Prior agreed, as 330,000 feet below the village and the Ancient outpost at its heart shattered under the weight of supercharged plasma, and the forest around it erupted into flames.

"Shield, shield, shield!" Grogan yelled, as the event horizon rippled behind him, veering immediately to his right the instant he materialised and diving for cover. An instant later, the air behind shimmered with golden energy, and a moment after that the wormhole hiccuped with a surge of transposed energy that clashed and clattered against the Stargate shield. The rippling pool remained only a moment longer before it burst like an errant bubble, and then there was silence.

Or at least, as close to silence as the Beta Site could muster. Colonel Dixon emerged from his own hastily-chosen cover, though he hadn't arrived at it with quite the same gusto as Grogan. Seeing the Captain's actions, and what had followed him through the wormhole, perhaps he should have.

"The hell was that, Grogan?"

Grogan winced as he picked himself off the floor, silently going through his usual post-mission checklist, marking off another mission where everyone had thankfully survived, and iterating the number of missions since he'd last been shot by one. "The village, sir." Three words and then a necessary pause, a few moments taken to refill his lungs. "The ship started pointing downwards, and they —" A vague gesture approximating the downcoming beam completed the sentiment for him.

"They blew up the village?" The disbelief in Dixon's voice was aimed at the situation, not at Grogan. "Why target the village, and not the Stargate? Isn't that their usual MO?"

"Because it was Ancient." Satterfield's shoulders slumped as she offered her somber assessment. One hand tugged the patrol cap off her head, while the other ran itself up across her eyes and back through her hair. "That's what this is all about, right? A pissing contest between the Ori and the Ancients. Burn the heretics."

"They are the Goa'uld, and the Alterans are the Tok'ra," Korra agreed, offering up an analogy. "The Ancients challenged their way of life and their existence as gods, and now the Ori seek to not just eradicate but erase them with the same ruthless zeal that the Goa'uld reserved for us."

Bosworth's shoulders sagged. "So we got out because they wanted us to. Survivors to spread the word."

"Survivors," Tolinev repeated, adding extra weight to the words. "That is the main thing, da?"

When she was right, she was right. Dixon never thought he'd find himself grateful for having a little of that Russian pragmatism on his team, and yet here they were. He didn't say as much, though: part pride, part doubt that Tolinev would have appreciated hearing it, and part because of the shrill whistle that punched through the air and drew the attention of everyone present to the far side of the embarkation area.

It was only now that Dixon allowed himself to look beyond his immediate vicinity, and survey the Beta Site at large. It was not his first time here, but it was still strange, an odd juxtaposition to Stargate Command's increasing trend of building bunkers and fortifications to house its offworld bases. The Beta Site was very much of the old style, a surface gate on an uninhabited world, surrounded by scattered structures: but unlike the two first generation Alpha Sites that Anubis had deprived the SGC of before his fall, the Beta Site carried with it a sense of permanence. The area surrounding the gate was paved, and the surrounding buildings were concrete, not prefabricated. Fixed weapons emplacements pointed towards the Stargate itself, not just automatic weapons, but missile emplacements, and staff cannons too. Sturdy barricades stood between his line of sight and the base itself, and across the way a somewhat permanent airstrip had been carved into the alien earth, upon which a flight of F-302s sat waiting — and curiouser still, a cluster of Death Gliders alongside. Overhead, a Tel'tak rumbled down from orbit, drifting towards a designated landing site, and beyond it he could see a cluster of military tents and corrugated aluminum structures intermingled with cruder tents and makeshift structures of a dozen different styles, from them swarming Humans and Jaffa and Tau'ri alike, volunteers and workers ready to unload whatever supplies the cargo ship had brought. Between it all, his eyes picked out the shapes of things it somehow felt wrong to see offworld: a jeep here, a forklift there, beside it a tank that sacrificed its usual turret for the same model of railgun that Earth mounted on her battlecruisers.

Dixon understood what the Beta Site was. When the second Alpha Site had fallen, this was where the survivors fled. The Tok'ra and the Jaffa might have pulled away from their alliances with Earth to concentrate on building homeworlds of their own, but that still left displaced humans from countless worlds needing to be protected and provided for. When the Priors had first arrived, that need had only deepened, and now the Jaffa once again found themselves seeking refuge with the Tau'ri as well. Then there was the elephant in the room — or rather, the naquadah in the soil: one of the richest veins that SG-11 had managed to discover, right here on PB3-865. As Earth's space fleet grew and its need for the mineral increased, it had made sense to consolidate Homeworld Security's supply lines through somewhere other than Cheyenne Mountain. Hell, they'd even wound up building the Odyssey here, hoping the offworld supply lines could help turn out a BC-304 a little faster than Area 51. And so, the Beta Site: shipyard, trade hub, and refugee cosmopolis.

Finally, Dixon's eyes settled on the source of the shrill sound, and there atop a strategically placed cargo container stood the Beta Site's commanding officer, posing above the assembled refugees like some sort of low budget recreation of a scene from Independence Day.

"Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention? I'm Colonel Louis Ferretti, the commanding officer at this outpost. I understand that you've had quite the ordeal, even more than was expected, but the important thing is that you're here, and you are safe. We already have beds set aside for you, and we'll have food ready within the hour."

You could tell that is was a practised speech, or at least a practised performance: even though there were no walls, Ferretti's voice rang out as if there were acoustics he was exploiting, and it settled over the crowd like a blanket, inspiring a gentle calm to brush away the chaos of the minutes before.

"All I ask is for your patience, and your cooperation: please remain here until our doctors have had the chance to check you over to make sure that everyone is healthy and unharmed. This is just procedure, and nothing to be alarmed about: it just makes it easier to find everyone if you all stay in the same place. If you need anything, if you're in pain, or hungry, just raise a hand —" He demonstrated, just in case the gesture didn't translate into the gathered cultures. "— and someone will come to you. Stay calm, stay together, and we'll get through this as fast as we possibly can."

He fell silent for a moment, his gaze sweeping across the crowd like a priest looking down from the pulpit upon his congregation. His eyes seemed to catch Dixon's from across the way, but if Ferretti realised, he didn't show it openly. Instead, he offered a small smile to the new arrivals.

"Welcome to the Beta Site."

Chapter Text

Air blasted out between Major General Jonathan J. O'Neill's lips, drumming out a staccato rhythm that on some level he must have somehow thought would dislodge his boredom. His body went through the motions of theatrically checking his watch, but his eyes didn't commit to the performance, his attention instead focused on the empty air in front of him. Was he standing in the right place? Was he too far to the left? Too far forwards? How accurate were these things, anyway?

"He's not due for another two minutes, sir."

O'Neill didn't react to the gentle reassurance from Major Gibson, save to internally acknowledge that it had happened. Sam had probably explained it to him at some point, he realised. She explained a lot of things that he'd never quite listened to as much as he should have. Then again, there was a lot he hadn't listened to when it came to Samantha Carter. Emphasis on the was, hopefully. A work in progress, at least.

"The process is essentially instantaneous, General Landry probably won't even have left —"

Jack turned towards her this time, granting the attention she was evidently seeking. "I know how Asgard beams work, Major," he countered, flashing his signature mix of grimace and tight smile.

Gibson was a competent officer, keen to help without being over-keen, but she was a little more prone to interaction in moments like this than O'Neill would have liked. If asked, he might have said that she made him miss Major Davis — his attention focused on offworld matters rather than homeworld ones these days — but that wasn't entirely true. Davis was just as chatty, he'd just known O'Neill for long enough to have a better sense of where the boundaries were. Not that he didn't miss Davis, but the reason was far less tangible. Davis was familiar, comfortable, in exactly the way that everything here at the Pentagon and his Office of Homeland Security wasn't.

Part of him hated that. The Jack O'Neill of ten years ago was stoic, independent, tethered by almost nothing. All that mattered was the mission, no matter where it sent him or who it sent him with. But Daniel, Sam, Teal'c, George, Janet, Jonas, all of them, they'd worked together to chip away little pieces of that version of him. He didn't feel less because of it, just more exposed. Daniel would probably have compared it to an archaeological dig, sifting away the dirt and the rubble to expose whatever had been underneath the whole time; but then everything was about archaeology with Daniel. Hell, they'd finally figured out that the Ancients had existed as an alien civilization before humanity had even figured out how to evolve legs, and Daniel had still found a way to dredge up all this King Arthur crap and make it about myths and book stuff again.

"I used to get abducted by these things all the time," he continued, gesturing towards the ceiling. That just made him think about Thor, someone else that he missed. That one stung in a different way: it was all Kvasir this, Hermiod that these days. Thor never stopped by anymore. Didn't call, didn't write. Maybe it was because the Supreme Commander knew, deep down in his heart, that O'Neill hadn't forgiven him for the whole ship named after him situation. It wasn't about ego: O'Neill certainly wasn't the sort to want statues or monuments built in his honour or anything — though given how much he'd done for this planet and this galaxy, he would have learned to live with it if someone somewhere had ever decided to acknowledge his undeniable heroism — it was more about manners. You name a ship after a person, and then it immediately gets blown up? You name a new one after them. But no, instead of the O'Neill II, Thor was cruising around the galaxy in the Daniel Jackson these days. Not that O'Neill cared, but still. It was the principle of the thing.

A small smile tugged at the corner of Gibson's mouth. Apparently she felt like she had succeeded in her attempts to provoke the General into a conversation, and perhaps ingratiate herself a little more. Annoyingly, it was working, at least a little. Another work in progress. Maybe the problem wasn't Gibson, maybe the problem was just Majors in general. You know who wouldn't have been trying to have a chat with him while he was trying to concentrate on being annoyed by something trivial? Walter. There was someone he definitely missed: constantly there, but never intrusive, not until the exact second you needed him to be. O'Neill had felt that Landry would benefit from that kind of support, what with being new to one of the most difficult jobs on the planet and all. But it had been a year now. Was that long enough? What was the statute of limitations on stealing back the Sergeant safety wheels you'd left attached to your successor's bicycle?

With an almost imperceptible slump of his shoulders, he conceded the point to the Major, and let her have her discourse.

"It just feels really awkward, you know? You stand around waiting, feeling like an ass, for someone to suddenly flash their way into existence out of thin air. You'd think we'd have figured out a better way to do it by now."

Gibson offered a slight shrug of her shoulders. "I hear that on Atlantis, the Ancients stashed their teleporters in storage closets. At least that way, people would be apperating behind closed doors, and you wouldn't have to wait around and watch it happen."

O'Neill's eyes narrowed, giving more thought to what was more than likely a half-joking comment than the idea probably deserved. It had taken three Airmen with tape measures and GPS devices to decide upon the optimum target coordinates to beam someone into O'Neill's office. There probably wasn't enough time to quickly radio the Odyssey with an updated set that would deposit Hank in the broom closet out in the hall, but O'Neill would be lying if he said he wasn't tempted.

He glanced down at his watch again, waiting as the liquid crystal display ticked over to two minutes past the hour. He turned towards Gibson again, a look of victory flashing in his eyes for a moment, just as a surge of bright light manifested from nowhere behind him, and coalesced into the familiar form of General Hank Landry.

"You're late," O'Neill accused, letting his attention linger on the watch for a few moments longer as added emphasis.

Landry didn't look phased. In fact, there was almost a subtle air of smugness on the almost smile that ghosted his features. "A wizard is never late," he replied, in his familiar unhurried drawl. Something twinkled in his eye, a brief flash of mischief, and O'Neill began to realise just how likely it was that Landry had been waiting a little longer than necessary just to wind him up.

"I've told you before," O'Neill quipped back, not familiar with the quote, but positive that it was one. "Enough with the cult references, they aren't fair to —" The words had tumbled from O'Neill's lips before his mind realised that he had just turned his attention to the empty space where his friend wasn't. "— Teal'c." The slump in O'Neill's shoulders was more visible this time, and the absence ached; but it only survived for a moment before it was quickly buried again.

O'Neill deflected from the slip, gesturing towards the door that led out of his office and into the corridor that would lead to where the rest of their 10 AM meeting was waiting. Landry nodded at the invitation, and led the way out into the rest of the Pentagon, looking more than a little uncomfortable in the jacket that he'd clearly only just put on. O'Neill felt him on that one: full blues were not what you wanted to be wearing while stuck behind that desk under Cheyenne Mountain all day. Rather than the O'Neill approach of rejecting a uniform entirely in favour of garrison dress, however, Landry seemed to have opted for the George Hammond shirt-only approach. It was a good look. Classic. O'Neill had tried it himself, although he wasn't quite carrying enough around the midsection to suit that ensemble. Maybe a few more years of being stuck behind a desk, not getting outside enough, and living off local takeout would take care of that for him.

"I could get used to this," Landry spoke up, as they advanced down the corridors towards the briefing room set aside for Homeland Security. They were on the lower levels of the building, far from any windows, safely firewalled behind key card doors that prevented anyone from just wandering in and overhearing anything they shouldn't. It almost felt like home; the realisation that O'Neill's understanding of the word referred to Cheyenne Mountain rather than his house in Colorado Springs was something O'Neill would need more than a brief stroll down a corridor to process.

"Yeah, well," O'Neill countered, grimly, "If we ever manage to not get our Battlecruisers blown up long enough to keep one in orbit on the regular, you can beam back and forth as often as you like."

"We have the technology now, Jack," Landry shot back with a chuckle. "You're telling me we can build spaceships that can fly between galaxies faster than the speed of light, but we can't figure out how to install a set of Asgard beams inside an a building?"

O'Neill actually knew the answer to that one, and was almost proud of himself that he'd evidently listened to enough of Sam's explanation to remember it. It was something to do with power, and infrastructure, and the fact that you couldn't just naquadah generator your way to success without the Pentagon needing to undergo an amount of renovation work that would have drawn public attention. There had already been some modifications covertly made to the Pentagon as part of the Phoenix Project, during the repairs and renovations after 9/11, but that had inconveniently been a few years too early for beaming tech. There'd also been something about satellites in Sam's explanation, but that had been the point where he'd deftly handed off the conversation to someone whose understanding of satellites extended beyond merely ‘thing that broadcasts The Simpsons'.

O'Neill offered none of that context to Landry. "You know, the Ancients hide their teleporters in closets," he offered instead, with the kind of tone that suggested he was sharing interesting trivia. Landry turned just enough to offer him a quizzical look. O'Neill shrugged it off. "Or at least, so I'm told."

If Landry had a response to that — from the look on his face, he didn't — he wasn't afforded an opportunity to contribute it. Instead, their meandering course through these Pentagon corridors — which were, to O'Neill's continuing disappointment, very much not pentagonal — led them to the imposing wooden doors of the briefing room. O'Neill reached towards the handle, planning some sort of after you, dear quip for Landry, but one of the pair of Marines standing sentry beat him to it. O'Neill forced himself to flash a grateful smile, even though it had absolutely no basis in sincerity, and allowed himself to follow Landry inside.

"General O'Neill, General Landry," a deep and commanding voice offered as the two of them filed in, quickly making their way towards the vacant seats that awaited them. General Maurice Vidrine, commander of the United States Air Force Space Command, watched them enter with a steely gaze so sharp it was probably laced with tritium. He wasn't an impatient man, and his gruffness wasn't a reflection on the few minutes past the hour that it currently was: he was just always like this, always stern and focused, and not at all interested in any small talk that might get in the way of getting the job done. It was something that O'Neill deeply respected from afar, but did not enjoy in the slightest up close.

O'Neill nodded silent greetings to the rest of the assembled group — not exclusively Generals, but close enough to it. General Francis Maynard, Chief of Staff of the Army and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was doing his best to tag-team with Vidrine in making O'Neill feel like he was under intense scrutiny. At least it was only one of the Joint Chiefs this time, and in a way Maynard was doing him a favour: every Homeworld Security meeting that one of the Joint Chiefs sat in on was one less briefing that O'Neill needed to make in front of all of them collectively.

Flanking Vidrine on the other side was Major General Martin Kennedy, the current Director of the NID. He'd begun life as a thorn in the side of Stargate Command, and then transformed into a veritable Sword of Damocles above their heads when he'd been promoted, clearing the path for the one-two punch of Harry Maybourne and Frank Simmons. Foolishly, O'Neill had been glad when he'd managed to sidestep out from beneath the attention of a succession of NID Colonels, not realising it would bring him back into direct contact with Kennedy. He'd been quietly hoping that Kennedy would serve out his five years as a Major General and then President Hayes would have the good sense to politely permit his obligatory retirement, but apparently Kennedy was gunning for Director of the National Security Agency. He'd probably have managed it too, if Robert Kinsey were still around pulling people's strings and whatever else it was he got up to; only time would tell if Kinsey's death would mean they'd dodge that Kennedy-shaped bullet in the long run, or just manage to turn it into a graze.

A little closer to home — and closer to O'Neill — was Brigadier General William Ronson. O'Neill had beaten him to Brigadier by a matter of days: alongside O'Neill's promotion to the desk at Stargate Command, Ronson had taken over Deep Space Command, an optimistic new organisation that collected together the Prometheus and the F-302 program, and imagined a future where Earth might have spaceships capable of travelling to other planets on purpose, and actually succeeding in getting there. Surprisingly, it had panned out, and though they'd suffered some losses along the way, Deep Space Command had an actual fleet of sorts, and a purview that spanned two whole galaxies. Not bad, all things considered. Ronson was one of the officers that O'Neill interacted with most frequently, and yet he still hadn't quite decided how to feel about the man. He was a professional, meticulous in ways that made him good at his job, but also in ways that made O'Neill feel like he needed to do his own job better, so as not to be shown up. His personality was a little dry, though, and he'd once admitted to never having seen The Simpsons, which O'Neill regarded as a significant black mark. He'd taken to addressing him as Commodore in private — he was in command of several ships, after all — which seemed to be a deviation from protocol and propriety that annoyed Ronson exactly the correct amount for O'Neill to find it satisfying.

Beside him was Brigadier General Dillon Everett. He looked good, all things considered: a year ago he had been fed upon by a Wraith, the literal life sucked out of him by an alien creature that from the reports made the Goa'uld seem cute and cuddly by comparison. Thanks to a cocktail of experimental therapies and a daily dose of tretonin, Everett had managed to claw back a few of his lost years, but not all. The experience still weighed on him, it was still etched into the Wraith-deepened lines on his face. The Marine Corps had wanted to put him out to pasture, offer him a pat on the back and a comfy retirement, but O'Neill had fought against it. Somewhere between the nanites on Argos and the death and resurrection torture routine that he'd experienced at the hands of Ba'al, he figured he knew better than most what it would feel like to have the life sucked out of you, to have your inevitable end and obsolescence hastened by outside means. O'Neill wouldn't have wanted to just sit around and wait for that end to arrive ahead of schedule, and doubted that Everett would either. So here he was, the bird on his shoulder exchanged for a star, Homeworld Security's official liaison from the Marine Corps. Officially, O'Neill had argued that with Marines deployed on Atlantis, offworld, and potentially aboard the Battlecruiser fleet as well, he'd need someone to collect all those chains of command together in a cohesive way. Unofficially, O'Neill was just glad to have someone else around who didn't feel old enough to be here. Only having to deal with one marine rather than several was just an added bonus.

Then there was Major Ian Hules. Even in a room that peppered Army and Marines amongst the otherwise blue uniforms of the United States Air Force, Hules seemed out of place, the green of his British Army uniform a completely different shade from anything an American would wear. It was a strange feeling, knowing there was a foreigner in the room but not feeling the immediate skin-crawling aversion that he did whenever there was a Russian around. Hules wasn't just British Army either: he was SAS, Special Air Service, one of the United Kingdom's various elite units, as the tan beret carefully tucked mostly out of sight under the edge of the briefing room table was supposed to illustrate. While new to this room, Hules was no stranger: he'd served at Stargate Command for years, his speciality training new recruits in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of SG-17's fateful first mission to Ravanna. While professional pride wouldn't allow O'Neill to admit it, the added expertise was both invaluable and welcome, especially now: the fewer men and women lost under General O'Neill's command, the better. Rumour had it that Hules had actually volunteered to be here, offering himself up as a sacrifice to the bureaucracy to satiate Britain's desire to feel more included, the way that the Russians had been, and the Chinese were currently pushing to be. If O'Neill didn't know any better, he'd have guessed that Hules was trying to shield him from having to deal with yet another layer of IOA bureaucracy; though in reality, the Major was probably more worried about O'Neill saying something inappropriate and causing a diplomatic incident with the chaps back home.

And then last, and least, there was Colonel Bert Samuels: the man who just kept failing upwards. He'd started out as General Hammond's executive officer, back when the Stargate Program was just a dormant metal ring with a blanket draped over it. Not competent enough to remain when Stargate Command was created, he'd fumbled his way into a role at the Pentagon, where his primary responsibility seemed to be brown-nosing his way into the good graces of whatever superiors or Senators happened to walk in front of him. As if aiding Kinsey in his little oversight coup hadn't been enough, his cowardice in the face of Apophis' attack on Earth had earned him an indelible black mark with Stargate Command. O'Neill had been on the other side of the door when General Hammond had explained to the Pentagon in no uncertain terms that if Bert Samuels was ever seen within a hundred miles of Cheyenne Mountain again, base security would receive orders to have him shot. That should have been the end of him, and yet somehow he'd now managed to slide his slimy backside into the commander's chair at Area 51. When Hammond had explained this, back when O'Neill was still a Brigadier, he'd made it plain as day that it was either Bert Samuels, or someone from the NID: better the devil you know, and all those cliches. For O'Neill, it felt almost as bad as the idea of a Russian on SG-1. The only solace was that, greasy and unpleasant as Samuels was on every conceivable level, the man was ultimately harmless — or at least, too ineffective to be of any real concern.

O'Neill took one last glance at himself and Landry as he slid into his seat. What a depressing ensemble of elderly men they had gathered. At least they weren't all white, he supposed grimly, but kept the thought to himself.

"We'll keep this brief," announced General Vidrine, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Papers were shuffled and pages turned as the various senior officers worked their way through the issues at hand. "The Odyssey is still under repair following their run-in with the Lucian Alliance, and the Daedalus is between galaxies transporting what men and materiel from the Atlantis Expedition the returning Ancients didn't immediately evict through the Stargate. Meanwhile the Supergate is effectively sealed, for now, with one Ori mothership destroyed in the process, and the military forces aboard a second wiped out by the Jaffa, although it cost them Dakara and their superweapon in the process. It has cost us two Battlecruisers and the Gamma Site to reach this stage, and we have lost numerous offworld allies along the way. I do not like these ratios, gentlemen."

"Let's not forget," Landry added, somehow somber and eager in equal measure as he expanded on just how dire their situation was, "That our intelligence from Vala Mal Doran indicates that at least six Ori vessels were constructed at Ver Isca, and we still don't know how the Ori constructed the Supergate near P3Y-229, or if there is anything to prevent them from building another and establishing another pathway into our galaxy."

General Kennedy's brow furrowed. "I thought the Supergate was formed out of smaller sections that the Ori deployed autonomously through a Stargate."

"That was true of the first Supergate," Landry agreed, displaying far more patience for the man than O'Neill would have been able to muster, "But the second Supergate is much larger. The individual segments from which it is formed are too large to have fit through a Stargate: the ships we encountered at 229 wouldn't have fit through the original Supergate at Kallana." He paused, to allow the information to settle rather than for deliberate dramatic effect, though the effect landed regardless. "Either they have or found some other means to send them here, or they were constructed locally, perhaps in a similar manner to the Tegalus satellite weapon that destroyed Prometheus: by providing the blueprints to an advanced world that has already fallen under their influence."

"Or several advanced worlds," O'Neill chimed in, with a grimace.

"It took them a year to build the last one," Everett observed, the glass of water in his hand seeming like it was playing an important part in keeping his voice steady and functional. "If the Supergate was built from our end, odds are it'll take them a while before they can manage to construct a second."

"Or," pointed out Ronson, "They conquer a few more planets and increase the rate of construction. They've already conquered Hebridan and Langara: both advanced, high-infrastructure worlds. If they repurposed the shipyards on Hebridan for Supergate construction, or worse for expanding their fleet, we would have no way to match that."

"What about the Asgard? The after-action report from P3Y-229 describes the —" Vidrine faltered, stumbling a little at the official designation for the Asgard ship. "— O'Neill-class warship commanded by Kvasir as being ‘moderately damaged, but mostly unscathed'. What military assistance are they planning to offer? Or do they intend on leaving us in the lurch, again?"

O'Neill's fingertips tapped on the table in front of him, and his eyes stared at the provided paperwork as he carefully collected his thoughts. "Kvasir's ship took less damage on account of their shields. An Asgard warship can take a beating, but so can an Ori one. According to Kvasir, the Asgard don't have anything in their arsenal that would be ‘significantly effective' —" He paused to add air quotes. "— against one Ori vessel, let alone three, and with resources and infrastructure on Orilla bottlenecking new ship construction, they're more or less stuck with the ships that they have."

"And how many ships is that?"

This time, the dramatic pause was deliberate. "Six." The number dropped like an atomic bomb, somehow making the already respectfully quiet room even more silent. "At least, that's what they had when I was on Orilla two years ago. Six O-class warships —" He dodged around the official name with a clunky alternative. "— and a handful of smaller ships. That's why the Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet has been flying around the galaxies in a science vessel named after an archeologist."

"Not to mention," Landry chimed in, "The fact that if the Ori can send warships to our galaxy, there's not much stopping them from reaching the Asgard home galaxy as well. Right now they're focused on the Milky Way, but if the Asgard throw their all into helping us, there's a very real chance that the proverbial kicked hornet's nest will fall in their backyard."

"What about the Ancients? The Lanteans," General Maynard clarified. "We've seen how formidable their drone weapons are, but they're stuck in Antarctica. They may not be willing to help arm us further, but if they'd at least be willing to help us integrate the drones we do have onto a ship —"

"We're only assuming that the Ancient weapons platform will be effective against the Ori," Landry interjected, with just the right amount of respect that a General with two extra stars deserved. "The truth is, we just don't know, and right now the only way we have to test that theory would be to fend off an Ori attack on Earth. By then, it's too late." He let out a small sigh, the frustration aimed at the situation they found themselves in rather than anyone present. "As for them helping us, right now I'm not sure the Lanteans would help us out of a river if we were drowning, let alone anything to do with our defense or survival. And as much as I would like to affect that from my end —"

"— the IOA called dibs," O'Neill finished for him, another of his signature grimace-smiles punctuating the sentiment. "They sent Richard Woolsey, so adjust your optimism accordingly."

General Vidrine's brow furrowed. None of this was news, not really. But there was a profound difference between the contents of a report, and having the gravity of a situation laid out in front of you, aloud. Not the first time that Earth had faced a grave threat like this, and not the first time that the situation had seemed hopeless and insurmountable. In all of those previous instances, humanity had somehow found a way to pull through, and emerged stronger and more capable as a result. Yet, there was a new insurmountable challenge seemingly around every corner. The universe kept moving the goal posts for survival, further and further beyond humanity's current reach. But for ten years, the organisations that the Generals and sundry in this room represented had saved the world in secret, and now he found himself near the top of that particular pyramid, Vidrine had no intention of breaking humanity's winning streak.

Kennedy spoke before Vidrine could, however. "If the Asgard cannot — and the Ancients will not — offer us military support, then at the very least can we petition the Asgard to share their shield technology? Even if our Battlecruisers can't mount an effective offense against the Ori, there's still a lot we can do with added survivability."

"It, uh —" Samuels hesitated, glancing around the table to ensure that no one was opposed to him being the one to field the question. "— it's unfortunately not that simple, sir. Our shield technology was given to us by the Asgard. We already have what they have. The issue is that the technology was adapted to work with our methods of power generation. It's quite ingenious, really: they gifted us a technology that will scale and evolve as the rest of our technology evolves. The same is true of our Asgard-designed hyperdrives as well. That is why we can integrate a more sophisticated power source, like a Zero Point Module, and see dramatic increases in our shield and hyperdrive performance. We don't need better shields, sir. We just need more power."

Kennedy scoffed at the semantics. "Then can we not petition the Asgard to share their generator technology? Or better yet, see some tangible returns on all these years of research into a viable ZPM alternative that Area 51 has been investing in?"

A subtle undertone of hostility cut through Kennedy's words, giving voice to the systemic bitterness pervasive throughout the NID at having had their precious Area 51 taken from them. Under their banner, Area 51 had pursued a technology at all costs approach to R&D, a mandate that allegedly rogue operatives under Harry Maybourne had taken to the absolute extreme in years past — though O'Neill had always felt a little sceptical about the "rogue" part. If you told him tomorrow that Martin Kennedy was in the pocket of the Trust, O'Neill would have responded with a shocked and surprised expression that he had spent literally years practising. The CIA's own investigation had declared him clean, and O'Neill trusted the woman who'd made that call completely, but he still couldn't shake the suspicion. There was just something about Kennedy that inspired that kind of reaction in a person.

"Well, sir —" To his credit, Samuels didn't seem at all rattled. In fact, it was almost as if the provoked hostility had bolstered his confidence somewhat, a spine slowly forming for once beneath the man's Air Force blues. "— we're actually working on that. A team from Area 51 is currently working with Jonas Quinn of Langara and even some Tok'ra allies to explore the possibility of using naquadria to augment our shield technology. As you know —" He gestured to Ronson in particular. "— naquadria is an unstable but potentially very powerful isotope of naquadah. We attempted to use it to power the hyperdrive on the X-302 and X-303, but the instability proved to be too unpredictable, and just like with a zero point module: more power makes for a faster hyperdrive, and unpredictable power makes for an unpredictable one. Trying to plot an interstellar course when you can't predict how fast you'll get there is like trying to throw a javelin at an airborne football from the far end of the field: if you don't hit, you're going to overshoot, and who knows where you'll end up."

"But with shields, that's less of a problem. If the naquadria starts providing more power than you're expecting, so what? More power means more shields, and because naquadria's instability is reactive, a power surge when your shields are under strain is the exact opposite of a problem. Our intention is to ‘turbo charge' our existing technology, so power is only drawn when the shields are taking fire, and our hope — our theory — is that the weapons fire itself will help to bleed off any excess. The longer an Ori beam hits us for, the more effective our shields will become."

Maynard arched an eyebrow, the explanation and terminology clearly testing the edges of his familiarity with the Stargate Program, but the gist of the notion still effectively conveyed. "And this is an actionable solution? We can actually make this work?"

Samuels hesitated again, his confidence slow to start, but eventually finding his feet. If O'Neill didn't know any better, he'd almost have guessed that the man had finally been cured of his chronic overconfidence, or had at least learned how to actively keep it in check. "Yes, sir, I believe that we can. The next Earth-built 304 is still several months away from being operational, but the Odyssey facility on PB3-865 has accelerated production. My team is currently there at the Beta Site, working with Jonas Quinn to integrate a viable prototype into that ship. With any luck, we should be in a position to begin testing the device's efficacy in a matter of weeks: hopefully in time to integrate the modifications into Colonel Ellis' ship before she launches."

Kennedy shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, visibly irked, desperate to somehow deprive Colonel Samuels of at least some of his agency in this particular breakthrough. "And so the fate of humanity rests on the shoulders of an alien."

"Jonas Quinn is beyond reproach," O'Neill snapped back, with just enough volume to provoke a startled reaction from Kennedy. "Who has, myself excluded, contributed to saving this nation and this planet more times than everyone else in this room combined." He let the accusation hang in the air for a moment, before shifting his attention not to the bureaucrats at the far end of the table, but to Everett and Hules sitting opposite. "No offense."

"None taken," Vidrine answered on their behalf, making a point of speaking before they or Kennedy had the opportunity to continue down that path any further. "And point taken. This nation owes a tremendous debt to our offworld allies who have stood by us time and again. The greatest shame of the Stargate Program's necessary secrecy is that instead of celebrating the heroism of these individuals, we treat them with suspicion and disrespect. Perhaps the Asgard have the right idea. The Russians, too. Perhaps instead of honouring the notions of myth and history in the names of our ships, we should be honouring the people here and now to whom we owe our lives."

"Assuming, of course —" O'Neill added, with a silent nod of gratitude towards General Vidrine, and a covert glare of victory towards General Kennedy, "— that we actually get to keep and name any of our future Battlecruisers, rather than having them extorted from us by our international partners." There was a darkness to the quip, and it was Landry who shuffled most uncomfortable at it, sparking a brief flare of guilt in O'Neill. Hank had been in an impossible situation when the Russians had used the Stargate to leverage control of the Korolev, and O'Neill knew he felt at least a little complicit in the situation they now found themselves in, partly through insight, and partly because Hank had outright told him over one of their last chess matches. O'Neill set about a necessary deflection, turning his attention to the SAS Major sat across from him. "I don't suppose you folks are in the market for a Battlecruiser, just as a way to rile up the Chinese?"

"If it corners the way your cars do," Hules replied, in an easy Scottish drawl, "I think we'll pass."

Everett chuckled at the response, though O'Neill managed to keep his face neutral, despite the much appreciated levity. "Corners," he countered slowly, words laden with pauses. "Something that space is notoriously full of."

"More than a name," General Ronson interrupted, the lack of focus on the briefing's objectives clearly grating against his sensibilities. "Our next Battlecruiser is going to need a commander, now that Colonel Davidson has been reassigned to the Odyssey."

Ronson allowed a moment of silence to fall; no one needed to explain why. A lot of good men and women had given their lives to the Stargate Program, and no one death should have been inherently more tragic than any other, but with Colonel Emerson's death, and Colonel Pendergast's before it, the circumstances made them sit a little differently. Colonel Chekov's too, for that matter. If Vidrine was right about what Earth's new Battlecruiser naming policy should be, they were going to have to start building a lot more 304s.

"My recommendation would be Colonel Gant. She supervised construction on the Daedalus, the Korolev, and is currently doing so on Colonel Ellis' new command. With Davidson reassigned, she would be the perfect person to ensure that construction at PB3-865 is completed to a satisfactory standard as swiftly as possible. She would be a valuable resource to the shield development project team, and she is a veteran of the original Prometheus mission; her pedigree within Deep Space Command is second to none."

"She's also a woman," Landry chimed in. "It's about time we started putting them in command a little more often."

Kennedy seemed almost insulted by the suggestion. Vidrine's reaction was more measured, but it came with disagreement nonetheless. "She's also only a Lieutenant Colonel," he offered carefully, "And one with only two years of time-in-grade at that. I don't doubt her familiarity with the ship, but we have thus far favoured full-bird Colonels for command on account of their seniority and experience. Someone like Colonel Edwards, who has fulfilled much the same role at the Odyssey site, might be the more appropriate choice."

"With all due respect, General," interjected O'Neill, with a noticeable lack of actual respect in his tone, "Colonel Edwards is an ass. He's fine at what he does, but there's a reason that what he does takes place on planets lacking in any natives to easily offend. He'll get it done, but there's more to commanding a Battlecruiser than just getting it done. He's not the sort of person anyone would want showing up in orbit above their planet, or rubbing shoulders with our international allies on an Atlantis run."

"But there is no more Atlantis run," Kennedy opposed, retaliating for earlier slights by sliding a concealed razor between his words, "And we are waging a war. Pendergast, Caldwell, Emerson, Davidson, Ellis — you as well, Ronson — all fine officers, but fine officers have yet to give us an edge against the Ori, or any of our other enemies for that matter. Perhaps in a time like this, someone to get it done is precisely what we need, regardless of the how."

"Hell, Kennedy, maybe we should just go all in and let Robert Makepeace out of his cell. That's the kind of man you really want, right? Victory at all costs, morality be damned?"

"Colonel Makepeace is a convicted felon," Kennedy replied through a clenched jaw. "Colonel Edwards is not. Unless you're planning to throw another decorated soldier's career to the wolves just because their tactics weren't nice enough?"

"I think —" Landry cut in, with all the tiredness of a man pulling apart two scrapping cats for about the hundredth time. "— we're forgetting that whoever we pick is going to have to pass muster with the IOA. While I would prefer —" A stern edge in that last word was aimed entirely at O'Neill. "— to hear the officers under my command discussed with a little more respect, I can't deny that Colonel Edwards is particularly unlikely to pass muster with a group so rooted in diplomacy, and I am sure they will raise the exact same concerns about Colonel Gant's level of experience. But neither of those things will matter if we can't field a 304 that will survive more than two hits from the Ori. If Erin Gant is going to up the odds of Area 51's plan succeeding, then let's get her through that Stargate and get those shields working. And if we're still undecided by the time the ship is ready to fly, then hell, I'll command it myself."

"Now if you'll excuse me —" He pushed his chair back half an inch in subtle emphasis. "— I have people offworld evacuating refugees from an impending Ori attack, and for me that feels like the issue most deserving of my attention."

Hank seethed quietly in the corridor as he waited outside O'Neill's office, disinclined to simply walk in without his fellow General's presence. Perhaps his outburst, if you could even call it that, had toed the line into inappropriate, but he lacked the mental capacity to sit around acting as if everything was the bureaucratic norm when he was the one at the bleeding edge of everything that the others weighed and balanced in the abstract. They hadn't seen the way that the Ori were treating the galaxy. They hadn't felt the plague that was being inflicted across countless worlds. They hadn't looked into the eyes of a Prior, or watched one burn themselves alive purely to make a statement. It wasn't real for them; or at least, not real enough.

Jack appeared with his hands in his pockets, a little sheepishness in his stance. He winced as he came to a halt, deliberately seeking out eye contact. "So I feel like I may have disrespected you back there. Possibly. A little bit."

A huff of laughter escaped Hank's lungs. "You're right, he is an ass. But Kennedy's right, we're fighting a war. We don't always get to be nice, and soldiers aren't always nice people. You know that, just as well as I do."

Jack sighed, head nodding a little as he conceded the point, hand emerging from his pocket and attention slipping away from Hank as he preoccupied himself with an imaginary spot on the wall. "He was my ass before he was yours, you know."

Hank let out another echo of a chuckle, a little more genuine this time. "Remaining diplomatic around people you object to isn't really a strength, is it Jack?"

"Not really, no." Jack's hand fell away from the wall, diving back into his pocket again. "It's a good thing the IOA didn't exist when they tried to give me this job. I'm pretty sure I would not have, how did you put it, ‘passed mustard'?"

"Passed muster," Hank chuckled. Damned Jack O'Neill, always playing the fool, just to make sure no one figured out how smart he really was. "I know from past cook-out experience experience that you're more than capable of passing the mustard."

"Only with great reluctance," Jack gently protested. "You know, it's people like you that are the reason our good nation is in turmoil. How can we expect to ever unite as a people when some Americans are out there desecrating hot dogs with mustard?"

"I thought you were supposed to be from Chicago? Aren't you supposed to load your dogs with pickles and onions and God knows what else, as well as mustard?"

"There's more to Illinois than just Chicago, Hank," Jack countered with faux offence. "And it's a hot dog, not a salad. If you want pickles, eat a damn burger —"

The conversation trailed off as Jack and Hank both noticed the approach of Major Hules. Neither could be sure how long he'd been there — he had a knack for allowing himself to go unnoticed, both on and off missions — and if they were noticing him now, then Hules certainly wanted them to.

"Something we can do for you, Major?"

A quick glance was cast in either direction along the corridor. "Mind if we step in tae your office for a wee second, General? It's about the Russians."

Chapter Text

There were windows around here somewhere. Burke knew that. He'd seen them from the outside. Damned if he'd seen one from the inside though, not for a long time. It shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise, he supposed. While the idea of secrets not seeing the light of day was either a metaphor or a simile — he always struggled to tell the difference between those two, especially when kids these days kept slotting the word 'like' into their sentences at random intervals — it was one that the US military had apparently taken to heart and doubled down on.

He wasn't new to the knowledge, and it was almost comforting that the Pentagon was still up to the same tricks as they had been back when he and Jack and the boys had been running Black Ops. He supposed that alien space portals, ancient zombie cubes, and literal invasion of the body snatchers scenarios wasn't exactly something you wanted to be shining a light on, after all. Only your clean laundry got to hang out in the sunshine; the dirty stuff stayed inside, shoved down to the bottom of the hamper until it was all good and crusty.

Then again, maybe it had nothing to do with that at all. Sure, Jack was a General now, President on speed dial and all that, but they'd still only pinned two stars to his shoulders. The guy at the top of the alien-fighting pyramid, and a Major General pay check was all the DOD was willing to spare. Maybe that was the explanation for this. Maybe Jack just wasn't getting paid enough for windows to be part of the benefits package. You sure did see a lot of laden shoulders and striped sleeves wandering the corridors around here if you paid enough attention: made sense that they'd all need to have dibs on somewhere with a nice view to sit down and take a breather between bouts of carrying all that metal and all those medals from mind-numbing meeting to mind-numbing meeting all day long, leaving nothing left for anyone else.

Not that Burke was salty about being here. Absolute opposite, in fact. After the whole fiasco in Honduras, he hadn't expected anything out of Jack; and to be honest, it had just been nice to get all that crap of his chest, y'know? Instead he'd wound up getting a phone call. Pleasant-sounding broad from Langley — one Ms. Kerry Johnson — wanting him to come in and interview for a spot on some new task force she was putting together. Whole thing had seemed a bit sketchy over the phone — the whole deal with the CIA was that they weren't supposed to operate on US soil, right? — but it turned out that when it came to international corporate conspiracies of mind-controlling space aliens, the CIA got to have a little more latitude in where it could go and what it could do.

So here he was. Jack insisted that it was Johnson he was doing the favour for: she needed someone who knew how to point a gun while digging into this whole The Trust scenario, and pulling in Burke was just a way to avoid having to brief anyone new on the existence of weird alien crap. Besides, Burke had spent the last several years on the trash heap, if anyone was safe from having had a snake snuck into their brain it was probably him, right? But there was more to it than that, and not just the whole vibe that Jack and Johnson had crackling away between them, until they didn't. Maybe something to do with that Daniel guy: sounded like Honduras wasn't the first time he'd wound up getting himself nearly dead, or maybe even actually dead — Burke had zoned out during that part of the briefing — and from the sound of things, Doctor Daniel Jackson was an important part of Jack's Team, capital T. Felt like maybe Burke had saved someone who mattered, and Jack was balancing the account. Burke could get behind that. Felt like a pretty Jack O'Neill thing to do.

But still, the windows; or rather, the not of the windows. You would not, never in a million years, not on pain of death, catch Eddie Burke complaining about being here at the Pentagon, helping the CIA to hunt aliens. With a few notable exceptions that sat a few branches further left on the whole versus aliens org chart, this was just about the coolest-sounding job he could possibly imagine. No regrets. No complaints. It was just that, loathed as he was to admit it, he'd kinda got used to the whole Honduras situation. Didn't love the heat. Didn't love the humidity. Didn't love the insects, or the beer, or the jack-all worth watching on TV. But for all its faults, Honduras had been a whole lot of outside, where as here was a whole lot of inside.

A window would have been nice.

"How'd it go?" the previously thought-about Ms. Kerry Johnson asked, the moment Burke stepped his way around the open door into the allocated workspace for her Anti-Trust Task Force.

You could tell a lot about a person by what they chose to do with the limited space that a standard sized desk offered them. You had folks like James Marrick, whose neatly organised files and meticulously sharpened pencils had 'anal' and 'asshole' laser-etched into every inch of them. You had folks like Burke, whose desk looked as if you'd dropped a hand grenade on it, hoping that by obliterating 90% of the paperwork in front of you, the information you actually needed would conveniently be nice and easy to spot on the surviving 10%. Then there was Johnson, someone whose desk definitely had a system, but one that was utterly incomprehensible to any rationally-minded living being except her. It looked like Burke-style chaos, and yet ask her for the most obscure of details, and she'd have the relevant file fished out and handed to you in less than three seconds. She gave off the vibe of someone who left her clean laundry stacked up on a chair because what was the point of stashing it away in a drawer if you were just going to wear it anyway, though obviously that was just a hunch.

Maybe he should ask Jack.

Burke heaved out a sigh, tugging off his black baseball cap and running a hand over the surprisingly smooth and these days mostly hair and scruff-free head. He'd done it three times already just in the last hour, but he'd been practising to get it looking right, and it sure did do an effective job of conveying how he was feeling without an unnecessary excess of words.

Half an hour ago, Burke had been dejectedly staring out at the DC traffic, crawling his way back from the Georgetown address that the CIA's investigations into The Trust had flagged as being of interest. Specifically, someone along the way had let one of the utility bills lapse, and that usually meant a place had rolled off the edges of said someone's attention. It was the opposite of a smoking gun, not much use for actively finding what remained of The Trust or the alien brain snakes that had wriggled into the upper management; but sometimes, it was useful to know where folks weren't anymore, because when people forgot about a place, they'd usually forgotten about anything that might have been left behind. Mostly, you found nothing, but sometimes you stumbled onto a place abandoned not because it was no longer needed, but because the people responsible for it had been swept up or chased off, leaving all manner of goodness behind.

The Trust was too big and too connected to try and look at everything everywhere all at once. They might be the CIA, but there was only so much they could do without drawing attention and looping more people into awareness of Stargates and aliens than anyone involved was comfortable doing. So they threw darts at the board, and hoped for the best: waited for a place like this to roll off the table, and hoped that they could piece together what else might have been on the rest of the plate.

"Another bust, boss. Looks like The Trust is definitely working off that old list of NID safehouses like we suspected, but this time they'd been and gone months ago. Left nothing for us to find except a few furniture dents in the carpet and a milk carton science experiment in the fridge."

"You must have felt right at home," Marrick offered dryly from off to Burke's right, those seven words carrying so much subtext that he was almost prepared to accuse them of possessing Goa'uld-enhanced strength.

"Look," Burke shot back, not actually annoyed in the slightest, but more than happy to play another delightful round of annoy the stuck-up jackass in the monkey suit, "Like I told you before, I got used to milk with a little more survivability back in Honduras. Not my fault that your First World fresh milk can't sit out for a few harmless minutes without taking a turn."

Marrick's face contorted as if he'd just sucked down a mouthful of the exact milk they were describing, but to his credit his eyes shifted in Johnson's direction before he replied, and caught enough of her patient but not much longer glare to decide that shutting up and getting back to whatever files he was combing through was the smartest next step for him.

"How many months ago are we talking?" Burke could never tell if Johnson was annoyed or amused by the bickering between her two subordinates, but as ever she floated above it like a Kindergarten teacher content to leave the infant assholes to their squabbling as long as no one was getting any eyes gouged out. "If we can stitch together more of a timeline, maybe we'll spot the puzzle piece we're missing."

Burke's face scrunched up, his eyes searching for answers and insight on the underside of his eyebrows. "They definitely walked out rather than getting space-whooshed up to orbit, that's for sure. Doesn't necessarily mean they weren't there back when they had their secret space ship, but it definitely seemed like they hadn't been there more recently than that." Not all that helpful an insight, Burke supposed, but at least it was a start. "If I had to guess, I'd say somewhere in the vicinity of three to six months? But we'll know more when the lab team has worked their magic."

His head cocked to the side, dredging up all the potential clues he could find. "Looked like someone left behind some trimmings in one of the sinks as well: not saying it was definitely your Ball guy, but somebody was putting a fair bit of time into beard maintenance, at least." His brow furrowed. "Maybe several someones? It didn't necessarily seem that way, but I guess it would be hard to tell with clones."

Despite attempting to look as if he was wasn't paying attention, the way Marrick pinched the bridge of his nose suggested otherwise. Burke fought hard against a smile. He wasn't sure how a man so frequently annoyed by disorder had managed to find his way into the CIA, let alone into this particular nook thereof, but Burke chose to look on it as a personal gift for him specifically.

"If it is who you're not necessarily suggesting it is, then it would probably be a safe bet that they bugged out before his little insider stunt at Stargate Command. Not much need for a safehouse if you aren't on the planet anymore. Not as good as a discarded newspaper with the date on it, but at least we know the —" Johnson caught herself before the pun slipped out, but followed through with it anyway. "— right Ba'alpark."

Marrick wanted to groan, it was painted across his entire physique, but the urge to well, actually proved to be the stronger impulse. "That's assuming that the SGC was successful in apprehending all of the Ba'al —" He paused to properly labour over the subtly different correct pronunciation. "— clones. As good as they supposedly are at what they supposedly do, Stargate Command has quite the penchant for leaving loose ends, and there's no reason to suppose that Ba'al made use of his entire clone arsenal to achieve his infiltration efforts."

Johnson made a face, but Burke cut in before she offered her rebuttal. "I'm with Mr. Manicure on this one, actually," he interrupted, taking a moment to relish the error message flashing behind Marrick's eyes as they tried to choose between being offended by the nickname and stunned by the agreement. "Someone at some point brainwashed Barrett. Doesn't have to have been one of the Ball clones, but based on everything else he seems to have been up to out in the galaxy lately, he seems like the sort of guy who wants to be doing everything himself. You don't go making copies so that you can be in multiple places at once if you only plan on spending all your time delegating. On top of all that, Charlotte Mayfield and the snake in her head are unaccounted for, and we know she was kicking around Colorado Springs as recently as a few weeks ago. The whole locator beacon plan feels like he was burning his bridges here on Earth, but we know that he still had people on this side of the river when all of that went down, and there's no reason to think he might not have been at least some of those someones himself. As it stands?" He shrugged. "We just don't know how many at large Balls there might still be."

The sigh that escaped from Marrick began at his feet and travelled through the whole length of his body. "Did you just agree with me, all so you could have a reason to say large Balls?"

"No comment. But I stand by my point either way."

"Your point being," Johnson summarised slowly, "That we know so little at this stage that we don't even know how much we don't know."

Burke offered another shrug. "Maybe? I don't know."

It was Johnson's turn to physicalise her frustration, grabbing a handful of loose curls as she clutched at the side of her forehead. Burke wasn't sure precisely how many months it had been since the Goa'uld had infiltrated the Trust, perhaps enough to begin counting in years plural at this stage; but he was certain that Johnson knew the length of time right down to the day. What was supposed to have been a simple clean-up after a handful of Rogue NID agents had gone and made a mess had turned into an albatross around her neck, her own personal Honduras to both resent and grow alarmingly comfortable with.

"How did things go with the new guy?" she asked, steering the conversation in a hopefully less frustrating direction.

"Bates?" He threw the name out as if it were a confirmation, rather than a way to stall for a moment and collect his thoughts. The former Sergeant was one of the Stargate Program's broken toys. Reflecting on himself for a moment, he wondered if Johnson was starting some kind of collection. Officially, he'd been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps due to injuries he'd sustained in what the official reports were calling the Battle of Atlantis, but the guy seemed perfectly fit and capable to Burke's eyes. Honestly, the whole thing smelt a little bit like scapegoating: the military always seemed to feel better when they could pretend that someone had taken the fall, even when no one technically did.

Burke wasn't privy to all the details, but from what he'd pieced together, it sounded like the IOA had politely suggested that Johnson might find Bates useful for her task force, which honestly felt a little ominous, but if the IOA was up to something they hadn't shown their hand just yet. Bates definitely had an aggressively suspicious nature, that much was for sure, and Burke supposed there was some value in that given what they were dealing with. A sense of humour would have been nice, but either one of those would grow on Bates in due time, or Bates would start to grow on him. That's how it always seemed to work: Burke could usually figure out how to get along with just about anyone, eventually.

"He's still a bit much of a Marine for my tastes, but he'll get over it. He gets the job done. No complaints."

It was a diplomatic answer, but none of it was untrue. Johnson nodded along, to the explicits and subtext alike. "Alright, Burke. I'm in a meeting with the General at 4; you can either have your written report for me by then, or join me, your call." Burke had been working with Johnson for long enough to know that it absolutely was not as optional as she made it sound, but he appreciated the illusion of free will all the same. "Oh, and a letter came for you earlier. I left it on your desk."

Alarm bells immediately rang for Burke: the mail call was presented as if it were just some casual afterthought, but the accidental undertone of fanfare made it clear that Johnson presumed it was anything but. The lack of curiosity, the air of casual disinterest, factor those in and it wasn't much of a leap to conclude that Johnson knew exactly what the letter was about; and from the way Marrick suddenly became even more focused than ever on the same few paragraphs of text that he'd most certainly already read two or three times by now, Burke was willing to conclude that he was aware of this mystery letter as well.

Slowly, suspiciously, Burke moved the few short strides to his chaotic bomb site of a desk, quickly spotting the unassuming white envelope that was very obviously the only thing present that was actively trying to be found. No address, beyond what was needed to guide it from one part of the Pentagon to another, navigating around whatever aliases and cover stories prevented the mail room from knowing what the occupants of this particular office space were actually up to. That it was a printed letter rather than an email meant that it was a read-then-burn kind of message, off the record, so to speak. Burke reached for the small of his back, unbuttoning the sheathe on his ka-bar and treating it like a lowly letter opener. The letterhead was instantly familiar. Air Force Space Command. Office of Homeworld Security.

Burke made it all of three sentences before a reaction managed to burst out.

"Well hot damn."

Sarah Gardner couldn't remember the last time she had seen a window. For someone in her circumstances, that might have seemed ominous, but to her it was strangely reassuring. In her younger days as a research associate, she had lost track of too many lightless hours to count, cloistered in windowless rooms, shelves upon shelves of rare artifacts wrapped around her like a cocoon. Her current surroundings were not quite as steeped in historical significance, of course, but they were still reassuringly cluttered, pleasantly-old books stacked on every available surface, sketchings and rubbings and renderings pinned and taped to every available surface, burying maps and charts and whatever else on the walls behind them.

To some, it might have seemed like a cell. It most certainly was not, in every sense save for aesthetic; but an unfamiliar eye might have been mistaken for assuming that someone like Sarah Gardner might perceive it as such, particularly given her history and circumstances. The idea that the United States military might have locked her in a room very much like this one seemed like an entirely plausible concern; except that for Sarah, such incarceration would have been far less of a prison than the one she had endured for three years within the confines of her own mind, trapped behind her own eyes by the insurmountable will of the Goa'uld Osiris. Compared to that, imprisoned within a single brain cell, any space she might have been locked in would have felt like an entire universe of freedom by comparison.

But this space was not a prison, quite the opposite in fact. This space was an opportunity, one provided to her by Agent Malcolm Barrett of the National Intelligence Department. She was pleased that the NID had sent an agent to state their case, rather than one of the uniformed military officers who comprised one half of their staff: it made the scenario softer, somehow, immaterial as the distinction was in any practical sense. A soldier might have made the request about war, pitched it as an opportunity for Sarah to take agency over her experiences with Osiris and fight back against his kind. Barrett had proposed no such thing. Instead, he had appealed to who she was underneath, the archaeologist she had dedicated her life to becoming, before she had been stolen away. To Barrett, someone with her unique perspective as he tactfully called it, might see things in a way that generations of scholars previously had not. History was littered with the footprints of the Goa'uld and other offworld influences, and yet none but the most paranoid had ever noticed. Barrett's request had not been that she use whatever lingering echoes of Osiris still existed in her mind as a way to fight back, to wage war, to gain an upper hand: his request had been that she use those echoes to find a way back to herself, to be the kind of archaeologist that no one but her had the opportunity to be.

So here she was, cloistered in her broom closet of an office at the Pentagon, pouring over every archaeological discovery and observation ever made by the human race, looking for the kinds of connections and correlations that none but her had the instinctive subconscious knowledge to spot. It was a long way from an easy task: after all, the essence of history was an elaborate chain of deteriorating copies, a paraphrase of a paraphrase of a paraphrase, each iteration clouded by new interpretations of past interpretations, themselves only interpretations of myth, and legend, and distorted fact.

In front of her, the writings of an English archaeologist speculated on the Greek interpretation of Ancient Egyptian religion, itself either based on or the basis for the real history of the Goa'uld, or in many cases both. Take Menes, for example, the supposed founder of the First Dynasty some five thousand years ago, a pharaoh from centuries before the pyramids had even been imagined. Except that history was wrong about the pyramids, far older than most humans believed, and built not as tombs and not even as mere landing platforms as Daniel Jackson had once theorised: they were monuments, persistent reminders of the Goa'uld even in their absence. Menes himself, meanwhile, was not the name of an individual as most presumed, but rather a title: a word rooted in an obscure Goa'uld dialect, a term for "king" with a similar etymological path to the contemporary Minos of the Ancient Greeks. An obscure connection, based on an obscure language not spoken on Earth for five thousand years or more, that only someone of her obscure circumstances had the potential to recognise.

She smiled, carefully positioning the thin sheet of her handwritten notes between the pages of the tome before her, and allowing it to close. Her eyes strayed to the walls, settling on recently added etchings of scenes from Arthurian legend. These were the latest obsessions of the Stargate Program: new knowledge that the exploits of King Arthur and Merlin had their origins in the exploits of the Ancients, the same race of gate-builders who had informed the myth of Atlantis, lent their names to the faiths of Greece and Rome, and then Ascended to a higher form of being to exist in an enlightened state of pure energy that, as Sarah understood it, was entirely indifferent to the suffering of everything below. It was a state of being that was easy to condemn, until someone informed you of the alternative: of Ascended beings from another galaxy, currently ravaging their way across the cosmos on some holy crusade of subjugation.

As Sarah understood it, Daniel Jackson and his compatriots were searching the stars for the Holy Grail, a sentence that was as absurd as it was exactly the Daniel Jackson thing to do. Sarah's task was less glamorous, but no less important. Ever since Stargate Command had discovered the Ancient catacombs beneath Glastonbury Tor, Sarah had begun to scour every source and resource she could find in search of other locales from Arthurian legend that might yield Ancient outposts of their own. When SG-1 had stumbled across Camelot — not a place of myth, but a living, breathing settlement on an entirely different world — Sarah had begun to chase offworld avenues for such Ancient sites as well. She had followed the linguistic trail from mythic Camelot to ancient Camulodunum and on to the Goa'uld Camulus. She had stared for hours on end at the etchings of the Heliopolis citadel from the writings of Ernest Littlefield, hoping to match it to some description or depiction of Corbenic or some other castle from Arthurian lore. Nothing concrete, nothing actionable, but a fistful of ideas and possibilities that consumed her every waking moment.

Daniel had asked once if the work was lonely. She supposed in a way it was, but she found solace in the solitude. Her thoughts were her own, and only her own; and the reminders were also scarce, without the burden of feeling the need to explain them to coworkers who might have noticed when they came. Daniel had invited her to continue her work at Stargate Command rather than here, the eagerness in his eyes impossible to ignore. It was sweet, and sincere, a genuine desire to just have her be close by without the obligation for anything more, and yet the undeniable buried hope of it. Sarah wished she could have said yes. She wished she could look upon his face without her stomach twisting from the residual murderous intent that Osiris had left behind; wished she could imagine the two of them together without reliving the pain of watching Osiris twist her precious memories into a way to dominate Daniel's subconscious in his sleep. It was not me, she silently urged, and it helped just as little as it had the previous thousand times she had tried.

Her thoughts were shattered by the polite rap of knuckles against her door; for the best, really.

"Come," she called politely, taking a rapid moment to restore her composure and needlessly straighten the items on her desk. The face that appeared as the door opened was familiar, though not overly so: Agent Burke, if memory served — which it always did — from the CIA task force a few corridors over, fellow residents of the confusing warren of workspaces buried in the Pentagon basement. The two of them had interacted only three times before, and then only in passing; so little in fact that Sarah couldn't recall ever having learned the man's first name. While Sarah's work was rooted in disentangling the activities of the Goa'uld on Earth thousands of years ago, Burke and his compatriots did the same for their activities in the present day. History versus Politics, she supposed, pretending for a moment that her colleagues and she conveniently aligned with the comfortable, familiar framework of an academic faculty.

Sarah rummaged around for the smile that had manifested a few moments prior, and gently eased it onto her features. "Agent Burke," she greeted pleasantly, subtly beckoning for him to enter despite the lack of any real room for him to do so. There was a sparkle in her eyes and her words, and for a few fleeting seconds it was almost possible to forget how much implicit sadness lurked beneath. "Let me guess: you have an urgent historical emergency."

Burke let out a laugh, small but genuine, restrained by a surprising hint of what might be mistaken for nerves. That seemed decidedly out of character, confidence not being something that Sarah had ever noticed him being short of in their prior encounters. Something else, then, like the hesitance that came when you were about to be an inconvenience and did not wish to be.

"Not exactly. But not exactly not, either." Sarah adjusted her stance, allowing her face to become visibly intrigued. She gestured wordlessly for him to continue. "I assume you're familiar with the IOA?"

The intrigue twisted into the faintest hint of a grimace. "Intimately," she replied, letting her accent do the heavy lifting to convey exactly the array of emotions one would expect. While the International Oversight Advisory was still in its infancy, created long after Sarah had been separated from Osiris and begun her work for the NID, that did not stop them presenting themselves as some new obstacle for her to overcome before she could do what she had already been doing for over a year. They had used all manner of justifications, carefully avoiding any mention of Osiris as their true motivations: it was her citizenship that was of note, they said, a subtle change from a British national consulting with the United States military to a civilian from an IOA member consulting on matters under their purview. Entirely routine, nothing to be concerned with, just a blanket justification to place her under as much scrutiny as their whims decided. "And unfortunately."

Burke winced, apparently familiar with the subtext. "Well the hot gossip is that the other IOA nations and the folks from the Antarctic Treaty have been pushing back against the Russians replacing Colonel Chekov with another military officer. Seems like the Russians were expecting the Chinese to back them no matter what, but the Chinese are pissed after the whole Stargate rental Korolev situation. Long story short, the Chinese hung them out to dry, and the Russians have been forced to split the job in two: a civilian representative on the IOA, and a separate military liaison to Homeworld Security."

"That all sounds very —" Sarah chose her words carefully. "— political."

"Right?" Burke agreed, oblivious to the fact that Sarah's polite responses concealed her impatience for him to find his way to explaining the relevance. "So anyway, Russia has these two new point people — point persons? — for all things Stargate. On top of all that, with the Atlantis Expedition sent home because of the whole surprise deep space Ancients thing, you've got all those Antarctic Treaty countries pushing for the IOA to make them feel like they're still able to contribute. Someone somewhere decided that what's needed is a corporate retreat, so the IOA has a bunch of folks getting shipped offworld to the Beta Site for some kind of tour, or something. After what happened last time the IOA went offworld, though, they've politely requested that someone other than the SGC does the babysitting, and someone else decided that someone other should be me."

"Congratulations? Commiserations?" Sarah didn't seem particularly committed to either option, and Burke's wave of information had done little to reveal which of the two he would have preferred, nor why any of this explained why he was loitering in the doorway of her office. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow how any of this pertains to me."

Burke shifted his stance, allowing himself to lean up against the door frame. "Thing is, it's my first time. I found out about all this stuff because of the magical zombie box in Honduras. I've read a bunch of mission reports, gone through all the briefings, even watched my way through that sad times documentary they send out whenever someone's KIA, but it's still all —" He waved a hand vaguely, leaving Sarah to fill in the reasons why a man like Burke might struggle with the idea of walking into a situation he was oblivious to, while surrounded by bureaucrats who were relying on him to appear competent enough to keep them feeling safe and reassured.

"Don't get me wrong, this CIA stuff is great, but it won't last forever and I'm not sure I'm ready to go back to a normal oblivious life when it's done, y'know? There's talk of the IOA wanting to take over a lot of what the CIA and the NID have done for the Stargate Program in the past, and if these guys are going to be recruiting any time soon? I don't want to screw this up."

In fact Sarah did know quite precisely how Burke was likely feeling. The circumstances of their exposure to the Stargate might have been profoundly different, but the overturned perspective on reality was much the same. Sarah had considered a normal life, even craved it after everything she had gone through. But how could she stand in front of a class of students and explain the version of history that their textbooks contained, knowing the greater reality that lived behind it? If she had retired to a quiet village in the English countryside, how could she have survived the trivial minutiae of being a person while knowing that the world might be in peril at any moment, and also knowing that you would never know if it was or wasn't? There were people who took their knowledge of the Stargate in stride, and slid happily into retirement. Sarah Gardner was not one of those people, and it did not sound like Agent Burke was either.

"And you think that I can somehow be of assistance."

"I just —"

Burke made his first mistake, a subtle shift in tone that gave the game away. It was a good excuse, the best kind in fact, because nothing he had said was untrue. He was indeed concerned about the impression he might make on the IOA. He really was contemplating his career options, and he did believe that Sarah could make a difference. But there was a moment of something behind his eyes that suggested something more; something that suggested he thought this might be as beneficial to Sarah as it was to him. There was a look that people gave her when they saw her circumstances, a look usually joined by the suggestion that she get out more, or by the question of whether this was all she wanted to be doing with herself. Usually it came with an undertone of judgement, from those who meant well but who most definitely felt as if they had made far better choices than you had. From Burke it was different, though: not someone looking down from above and expecting more of those below, but rather someone looking to the person beside him, gesturing to the rope held in their hand and offering a leg up. Sarah wasn't sure if the rope connected to anywhere that she wanted to go, but she did not begrudge the sentiment.

"— I need someone to come with me and answer all of my dumb questions before the IOA realises I have them. I'm good at what I do, but all this ancient aliens stuff goes right over my head."

"So you come to me," Sarah chose the tone of her voice with the utmost care, just enough of a lilt to translate her deadpan British humour into American, "An ancient alien's former roommate, for help."

Burke winced, fairly sure he hadn't caused offense, but making sure to go through the body language motions just in case he have. "Sorry, is that inappropriate?"

"Probably," Sarah replied, but the smile she flashed him was cheerful and genuine. "But no more so than me coming to you if I needed something shot, I suppose."

Her eyes shifted away from him for a moment, focusing on the sketches on the walls beside him. For three years under Osiris' thrall, she had wanted nothing more than to return to Earth, to be free of all this, to be back home. For three years since, she had refused to let herself admit that at least part of her wanted to leave, and witness the galaxy that Osiris had revealed to her on her own terms. She fought against it, unsure if the impulse was hers, unsure it wasn't something more sinister, unsure what would happen if she ever laid her eyes on the chappa'ai again. But if she remained here, it would always be a question, always a concern, always with her. Sometimes, it was better to live with things that had gone wrong, than live with the fear that they might.

"I'll think about it," she conceded, a flicker of resolve setting in her features. "When are you due to leave?"

"Tomorrow." Another wince. "At 0600. From Colorado."

"Ah." Sarah's fingertips drummed a few quick rhythms against the edge of her desk. "Then I suppose I shall have to think about it rather quickly."

Burke flashed her a quick smile. Presumably he intended it to seem grateful, but there was more to it than he intended, a hint of victory perhaps, as if he somehow knew that deep down that Sarah had already reached her answer, and was merely going through the motions of consideration to make herself feel as if the impulses she couldn't place weren't controlling her.

"Then I will leave you to it," he replied, only loitering for one grateful moment longer before retreating his way back out into the corridor. Sarah called out after him, interrupting his retreat mid stride.

"Agent Burke?"

"Yeah?"

It was Sarah's turn for a hint of embarrassment. "I don't think I ever caught your first name."

Burke grinned. "Edmund," he replied. "But Eddie is fine."

Sarah arched an eyebrow, caught off-guard by the unexpected intellectual slant. "Like the Irish politician and philosopher?"

"Like the hockey player," he countered with a shrug. "My mom sure does love her Bruins."

Chapter Text

I love the smell of Naquadah in the morning.

One of these days, he’d grow tired of that joke, but today was not that day. It didn’t matter to Colonel Louis Ferretti that it technically was not morning here on PB3-865, nor that he actually wasn’t sure if the industrial aroma in the air had anything to do with Naquadah — for all he knew it was the consequence of cooking or laundry or some other essential process taking place in the Beta Site’s corona of refugee encampments — but it didn’t matter, because it was all about the routine of the thing, the comforting repetition of a tired old joke, a sense of consistency in the face of chaos that fell within one’s sense of control.

It was morning back on Earth, though. It was always morning everywhere, he supposed, but in this instance it was only the time in Colorado Springs that mattered. It was one of the lesser acknowledged things about Stargate travel and offworld bases. Sending a team on a mission wasn’t something you could just do on a whim: MALP telemetry and UAV recon didn’t just check the air was breathable and take a peek at the surroundings, they tracked light levels and solar movements, and from that the smart folks back at Stargate Command somehow managed to figure out how long the days would last, and what timezone the offworld gate was in.

Back in the early days, back when there were only nine teams out of Cheyenne Mountain and Ferretti had been the leader of one of them, things had been a little more loosey goosey, and no one was particularly averse to sending an SG team to go snoop around an alien planet in the dead of night. These days, though, with teams all the way through SG-25, and enough offworld bases that they’d already had to stop using Greek letters and switch over to actual names? Figuring how to get everyone offworld and then back home again without wormholes bumping into each other was a whole new level of complexity, and Ferretti was glad that for the most part he wasn’t in any way responsible for figuring any of it out.

And so that was why, despite being a few thousand star systems away, the Beta Site actually gave a damn about Mountain Standard Time. He glanced down at one of the two watches strapped around his wrist — a choice made mostly because one of his officers had told him I guess it would be weird if you wore two watches, practically daring him to do so in the process — and waited as the 05:46 ticked over into 05:47. That gave him thirteen minutes to complete the five minute walk from the main Beta Site itself to the Stargate out on the tarmac outside. He still found himself in two minds about that: the Alpha Site and the Gamma Site had — particularly past tense, in the latter case — the familiar arrangement of gate room and concrete building, defensible surroundings for the Stargate and anything that might arrive through it. But for the Beta Site, such things would have been impractical. Between the refugees that 865 harboured from the Goa’uld, the Lucian Alliance, and the Ori, and the shipments of Trinium, Naquadah, and whatever else that Stargate Command pulled in from offworld allies and outposts, a gate room like that would have made the logistics almost as impractical as sending things direct to Cheyenne Mountain — not to mention the complicated politics of you’re welcome to stay here, refugees, but we’re going to insist that you go through a ridiculous amount of security checks and protocols before we let you in or out. Differences in how the Tau’ri, Tok’ra, and Jaffa had done things had almost torn the alliance between them apart at the older Alpha Sites, and while the Jaffa right now weren’t in a position to be beggars trying to make choices, the less they did to antagonise anyone here, the better.

Better for them, but more importantly better for the Colonel charged with looking after them, too.

Well, mostly charged. Or alternatively, one of the Colonels. When things had started here on 365 a few years ago, Ferretti had been the one Colonel to rule them all. This was his base; it was his call. Now he was dealing with more of a three rings for the Elven kings under the sky scenario: one Colonel overseeing the logistics of Stargate Command’s offworld mining concerns, another babysitting the construction of the Battlecruiser that Deep Space Command was having constructed below the foothills just beyond the base. If the three Colonels had been content to stay within the borders of their own domains and jurisdictions, then there could have been peace among them. But Colonel Edwards was not a man who was content to remain in Mirkwood and keep to himself; and while Ferretti had enjoyed his time working alongside the mild-mannered and far more affable Colonel Emerson, the Odyssey had already taken him off to the Undying Lands, and the Elven Kings who had reigned in his stead had been far less agreeable, and far less reliable as allies against Colonel Edwards’ approach, politics, and personality.

The analogy stuck in Ferretti’s head like a thorn. The Undying Lands. He hadn’t meant it that way, he’d just intended to lament the departure of the Odyssey and her now former commander, but the Lucian Alliance had added a new layer of truth to the comparison. It could not have come at a worse time, either: with Ori ships and armies marching their way across the galaxy, the Lucian Alliance and the last handful of System Lords squeezing the Human and Jaffa diasporae for every last grain of useful resource, the SGC’s more technological allies dropping like flies on all sides, and now the Ancients sending the Atlantis Expedition back home with their tails between their legs? The loss of Paul, and the absence of the Odyssey from the fight as she underwent repairs in Earth orbit, represented a low for Stargate Command that hadn’t felt this real since Anubis.

The tiny fragment of solace was the fact that Emerson’s replacement, Ian Davidson, had become his replacement yet again. Ferretti hadn’t been particularly fond of the guy when he’d shown up to take over Lothlórien and oversee the construction of a little sister for the Odyssey. Ferretti couldn’t quite place it, but something about the new Colonel had always reminded him of someone else he felt he didn’t and shouldn’t like. But thankfully his Celeborn had left, and from the sound of things, Stargate Command was sending a Galadriel as a replacement. Ferretti wasn’t too familiar with Erin Gant — she’d been stranded on Tagrea for most of Prometheus’ early career, and he’d been assigned to the Beta Site by the time they made it home — but all that mattered to him was that she was less insufferable than Colonel Edwards, and fortunately for everyone that was a pretty low bar to clear.

He glanced down at his watches; two minutes of his walk wasted, lost in thought. This was why he always afforded himself more time though. The distractions weren’t always his own thoughts, but they were omnipresent here on 365. It was one of the things he liked about the place, though. As he left the yawning entrance of the Beta Site compound behind and began to weave his way through the village of prefabs, huts, tents, and sundry that he essentially found himself the de factor mayor of, he took the time to notice and recognise the faces he passed. He exchanged a silent not with Shaq’rel, a Jaffa whose Tel’tak had once help save Earth from Anubis, and now helped save the Beta Site from even more pervasive foes like hunger and greed. He mustered a small smile for Laira, a woman who had become almost an ambassador from her homeworld Edora, one of Earth’s oldest offworld trading partners. He recognised Talia, one of the Nasyans that Stargate Command had saved when Cronus invaded their world; and Eliam, one of the Enkarans whose physiology had made a new homeworld so difficult to find — both here to pay that aid forward and help the newly arrived refugees that they’d just pulled from P3X-367.

Ferretti had never imagined himself in a situation like this, never imagined himself being responsible for so many people; so many faces. Before the Stargate Program, his career had peaked at Major and he’d been quite content to stay there, following the likes of Colonel O’Neill on missions galore, doing the job without calling the shots. But then Abydos had happened, and things had changed. It was the second trip that had changed things. Perhaps it was the same head injuries, the ones that had rendered him unable to join SG-2 on that first mission to Chulak, that had knocked some sense into or out of him; perhaps it was just the guilt of wondering whether or not an extra pair of eyes keeping watch for alien snakes in the grass would have been enough to have brought Kawalsky home safe. Perhaps in that universe, or those infinite universes if Ferretti understood correctly how multiverses worked, Charlie was here and Louis was not. He would have loved it: he’d barely been able to hide his excitement over his first command during that last bedside visit to Ferretti in the infirmary before he’d left; imagine how overjoyed he would have been at all the aliens and cultures that Ferretti saw every day, so perilously close to taking them for granted.

That particular existential crisis was one of his mind’s favourites, although it preferred to save that guilt and grief for the depths of night rather than daylight hours.

Another of 865’s welcome distractions presented itself, this time in the form of an imported special: Dave Dixon stepping out from within one of the larger tents, wiping at his mouth with a paper napkin before stashing it deep into one of his pockets.

“Good?” Ferretti offered, by way of greeting. Dixon had made the mistake of mentioning his empty stomach during their brief debrief on the evacuation from 367, and once the newly arrived refugees were suitably settled, Ferretti had been all too keen to describe the spectrum of cuisine opportunities that the Beta Site had to offer. It was one of the biggest differences between the Beta Site and the way that they’d done things back on the Alphas: they’d been defined by adversity, the Jaffa who’d escaped from the yoke of different System Lords clashing with each other, the Tok’ra, the Tau’ri, the local fauna, their own shadows, and just about anything else; but the Beta Site defined itself by diversity, Human cultures separated by thousands of years and thousands of lightyears finding ways to pull together and coexist. It was inspirational, yes, a delight for every anthropologist who set foot on the planet without a doubt; but most importantly, the food was phenomenal. Back on Earth they had a fancy new thing called fusion cuisine, but here on 365 that was just lunch on a random Tuesday.

“Not bad,” Dixon conceded; not as enthusiastic a response as Ferretti would have liked, but then Dixon was a man with four children who probably lived off TV dinners and take-out whenever he was home, and not bad was better than nothing. “Not sure I could name any of the plants or animals I just put in my body, but I didn’t hate it on the way in. It’s the way out that concerns me.”

Ferretti let out a chuckle. “Don’t worry, I’ll have security clear a path to the latrines when you need it.”

Dixon raised a mildly concerned eyebrow. “When? That wasn’t part of the briefing.”

Ferretti shrugged. “You know how it goes, Dix. When has anything to do with the Stargate ever matched up with what was in the briefing?”

A whiff of a chuckle escaped from Dixon, but Ferretti could tell that the Colonel — another one; he was rapidly running out of Elves at this point — was still hung up on the events of 367. During the debrief, a few concerns had been raised about the Ori showing up ahead of schedule. Had they merely been ahead of schedule? Had they exploited the citizens of 367 as bait in a trap? Had someone drawn them there, deliberately, and if so for what purpose? Things weren’t quite adding up for Ferretti, as far as his understanding of the situation was able to stretch, and making a priority out of destroying the Ancient ruins instead of their usual fire and brimstone approach to non-believers was new information. Perhaps there was more to the situation, or perhaps the Ori were so certain that they’d manage to wipe everyone out in the end that they weren’t in any particular rush about it.

A faint hint of softness crept into Ferretti’s tone. “We got them out. Mission success. There’s nothing more to be done until you’re back on world; and then it becomes Landry’s problem.”

Dixon nodded in agreement, but the reassurance didn’t do much to dislodge the concern from his features, discreetly worn such as it was. “I don’t like leaving things unfinished.”

“We’re saving the galaxy,” Ferretti countered, with a sympathetic shrug. “We won’t ever be finished doing that, but you and your team helped move us a planet’s worth of people further forward today. Take the win, that’s an order.”

“Pretty sure you don’t get to give me orders,” Dixon shot back, his voice an iota lighter than before.

“Maybe not,” Ferretti conceded, “But if Stargate Command is gonna keep insisting on adding more Colonels into my kitchen, I figure I might as well just start throwing orders around and hope that no one else figures that out.”

“Play that back?” the voice of Carl Grogan requested yet again, and Captain Graham Simmons dutifully complied, tapping away at the keyboard of his computer. A soft breeze tugged at the back of his neck, whispering in through the canvas doorway that had been rolled up to afford a clearer view of the gate. It was quite a change from the Cheyenne Mountain control room that he’d once been accustomed to, and arguably quite the downgrade, but PB3-865 did not need an entire dialling computer, and with the Stargate positioned on the concrete airfield outside the base, an Air Force issue tent with a few laptops and comms units was both all they needed and all they could manage.

On the screen in front of him, a frame by frame playback of the last few seconds of MALP telemetry from P3X-367 repeated itself. While the explicit detail was hard to see at this distance and resolution, the sequence of events was plain as day: a beam of light from the sky landing point blank on Nirrti’s former stronghold, and then an explosion and blast wave tearing its way outwards through the planet’s no longer forested terrain, until visibility dissolved into fire and debris and then blackness.

“That’s where the signal cuts out,” Graham confirmed, again, offering a little more definitive context this time in the hopes that the question would not be repeated. “There’s no way the MALP survived the impact, and even if the Stargate is still in one piece it’s almost certainly buried.” He gestured towards the Dial Home Device, tucked away just outside the limits of the tent, for emphasis. “We’ve been dialling back periodically, and nothing.”

Grogan nodded, satisfied with the information that his fellow Captain had provided, and yet unsatisfied by his understanding of what any of it meant. “You’re sure it’s buried and gone? There’s no chance they might be dialling out?”

Graham squirmed uncomfortably at the new question, almost wishing Grogan’s insistent asks would revert to their previous topic after all. Of course there wasn’t no chance they might be dialling out. They were in space, on a planet with an inexplicably breathable atmosphere, surrounded by inexplicably familiar flora, in a galaxy inexplicably filled with inexplicably familiar worlds. Some of those worlds were filled with sentient bacteria that were as infectious to concrete as they were to people. Some of those worlds were perilously close to black holes, which somehow translated their gravity through a supposedly one-way wormhole. Some of those worlds were home to android teenagers who could transmute metal objects into LEGO brick mechanical spiders just because they were bored. Graham had learned, repeatedly and intimately, that nothing was impossible anymore, because as soon as you let yourself comfortably believe that something was impossible, that’s when it inexplicably stopped being so.

However, something else that Graham had learned from the Stargate Program in particular was that people didn’t always ask the question they intended to ask. People didn’t always want the exactly correct answer, no matter how insistently your soul felt that you needed to offer it: sometimes they just wanted a utilitarian enough answer to move on with their day. Graham liked to think of it like numbers: sometimes in science you didn’t need all the decimal places, and sometimes it didn’t even help. Your results could only be as accurate as your least accurate measurements, and sometimes the accuracy of the mental equipment your colleagues were measuring with didn’t facilitate that much accuracy at all.

“Do you want the Colonel O’Neill answer, or the Colonel Carter answer?” Graham countered. Something else he’d learned was that people were often a lot happier about embracing the simple answer when you gave them the opportunity to actively choose the simple answer.

Grogan huffed out a note of laughter. “Let me guess: the first is no, and the second is no, but I could probably figure out how to do it, something like that?”

Graham shrugged. “Something like that,” he agreed.

“You know it should probably be the General O’Neill answer, not the Colonel O’Neill answer, right?”

“Oh no,” Graham countered, the faintest flicker of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “The General O’Neill is no, sir.”

Grogan laughed, sighed, clapped Graham gently on the shoulder, and then deposited himself heavily into the nearby vacant chair, somehow as part of a singular fluid process. Graham fought a flinch at the unexpected physical contact, glad of the extra layers of uniform his camouflage BDUs offered, compared to the short sleeved dress shirt he’d have been wearing if they were in the gate room back home.

Home. He puzzled for a moment over why that word seemed to mean Cheyenne Mountain, and not anywhere he’d lived since or before. While he’d been honoured to have been chosen to be part of the X-302 Program, and flattered to learn that Samantha Carter herself had made the recommendation, there was something about Area 51 that didn’t feel comfortable in the way that Stargate Command had. As best he could remember, nowhere had ever felt that way for him: not his childhood home, not the Air Force Academy, and certainly not PB3-865. There was a gravity to Stargate Command, and even travelling to another planet — an adventure that had been exciting until it inexplicably became routine — didn’t stop that cosmic force from translating its way through the Stargate in an attempt to pull it back.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the place, but the people; perhaps even person, singular. His ears threatened to turn themselves pink, and he quickly tore his attention away, a deathbed confession from seven years ago still chasing him to this day. He almost wondered if he should try and get himself reassigned to the Pegasus Galaxy in the hopes of outrunning it — a strategy that certainly seemed to have worked for Rodney McKay, but also one that was now sadly impossible. He winced internally, and corrected himself; not impossible, right? Or perhaps yes, impossible: because perhaps by believing it to be so, he could somehow goad the universe into changing things so that it would inexplicably not be. With the way things had been going lately, Stargate Command was due a lucky break like that.

“Sorry, Gray,” Grogan apologised. Graham wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that particular abbreviation of his name, but his enjoyment of having a nickname at all vastly outweighed any discomfort that might have been there. “I just don’t like feeling as if I’m missing something. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube that I can’t solve, and my brain is refusing to put it down.”

Graham latched onto the sentiment immediately, every late night into early morning hunched over gate diagnostics and subspace calculations coming back to haunt him. Gone was the fatigue of repetitive scrutiny, replaced instead with the overwhelming desire to help, to solve, to gently lift the Rubik’s Cube from his fellow Captain’s hands and help the colours to align the way that they should. He shifted in his seat, turning away from the laptop in front of him and towards his fellow Captain.

“Well, maybe we are missing something,” Graham offered, honestly if not necessarily helpfully. “Satterfield didn’t get much opportunity to elaborate on her findings during the debrief. Was there anything she told you that might explain why the Ori cared more about destroying the Ancient citadel than about whether or not you and the rest of the godless heathens managed to escape?”

Grogan quirked an eyebrow at godless heathens; Graham caught the expression just enough to dismiss it with a quick shrug, giving Grogan’s face permission to contort into something more contemplative instead. “Something about that floating Ancient molecule language?” he offered, vaguely; at a guess, the way his eyelids pinched at the corner was the visual collateral damage of whatever regret and self-chastisement was going on inside the Captain’s head. “The markings on the walls translating into the three dimensional stuff, somehow. Something like that. I was a little busy keeping watch while Lizzie was grumbling about it as we bugged out, I didn’t really catch as much about it as I probably should.”

Something in Grogan’s tone made Graham feel as if he should offer some sort of reassurance or comfort, but that was a separate task from the one he was focused on, and the best comfort he could offer was some sort of peace for the answers that seemed to be buzzing about in Grogan’s mind. “Well, this is the place where Nirrti did her hok’tar experiments, right? Maybe the Ori know about that, and are worried the walls have repair instructions or something. We know Anubis was planning to use technology to Ascend an army to fight the Ancients, maybe the Ori are worried we might try to do the same thing.”

“Huh.” Grogan sat back in his chair, musing over the scenario that Graham had just presented.

It was a guess, and quite likely to be an incorrect guess, but sometimes just having a possibility at all was better than the chaotic, taunting emptiness of having no idea where to even start thinking your way out of a crisis. Graham could still remember the agony of when Anubis had used some sort of Ancient technology to gradually build up a charge inside the Stargate with the goal of its eventual catastrophic detonation. They’d barely noticed it at all at first, nothing to show for it save for a wormhole that wouldn’t shut down, and even when they had discovered the faint gurgle of energy trickling into the gate’s superconductors they hadn’t the faintest idea of how to stop it. That had been the worst kind of feeling: a ticking clock until the world’s destruction, and no way to know if you’d have enough time to solve the problem if you even ever figured out how. The stress and chaos of trying to duct tape the Stargate to a space fighter and frisbee it out of orbit was relatively calm by comparison.

“You’ve got to hand it to Anubis,” Grogan mused, his demeanour seeming to shift into something ever so slightly more relaxed, “He definitely managed to corner the market on Frankenstein super soldiers. Guess we’re lucky that he got taken off the board when he did: imagine how gnarly things could have got if he’d been able to add Wraith DNA to the mix, huh?”

A spark of panic formed in Graham’s brain. He was quite confident that they did not in fact have to hand it to Anubis at all, and he very much did not want to imagine a nightmare scenario like that, thank you very much. Fortunately for Graham, his need to respond was aborted by a sequence of shrill staccato beeps from the watch wrapped exactly tightly enough around his wrist. He glanced at the liquid crystal display. 16:47, Beta Standard Time. Almost noon, and fourteen minutes before the next scheduled dial-in from Cheyenne Mountain. That Earth Time and 865 Time had come so close to their hours aligning — out by a mere 87 seconds this time around — was deeply frustrating, but it was lessened by the satisfying familiarity of the four digits at one minute past this particular hour.

“Oh-six-hundred?” Grogan prompted, demonstrating both his ability to correctly infer Graham’s alarm motivation from context clues, and his horrifying choice to live his life on Mountain Time despite its complete disregard for the awkward length of PB3-865’s days.

“Almost,” Graham agreed with a nod, extracting himself from his chair and tugging down on the front of his camouflage shirt, an affectation he’d caught himself increasingly adopting since his promotion to Captain. “Just enough time to figure out the least awkward place to stand when everyone arrives.”

Grogan let out a soft chuckle, followed by a brief moment of realisation that Graham was not in fact joking, and sincerely did feel like this was a task that he needed to set aside at least ten minutes for. It morphed into a smile as he hopped to his own feet, fell into step beside his fellow Captain, and wrapped an arm around Graham’s shoulders.

“Thanks for helping me work through everything, Gray. You’re a good friend.”

Graham didn’t even flinch at the unsolicited physical contact this time, for once finding the meaning behind the tactile experience and its accompanying words actually as comforting as it was intended to be — perhaps more so. He smiled quietly to himself, as the two stepped out of the tent, and onto the concrete of the airfield that so many of the Beta Site occupants insisted on erroneously referring to as tarmac.

I am a good friend.

Colonel Martin Edwards stalked through the burdensome tangle of tents and shanty huts that complicated the pathway between his Naquadah refinement operations and the Stargate itself. It was how he always moved, muscles tensed and coiled like a boxer prepared to strike out at anything that threatened to encroach on his personal space. Here at the Beta Site, his stance had added a flicker of cowboy swagger, one of his hands never far from the In’tar Beretta holstered on his hip. Colonel Ferretti — in his “infinite wisdom” — had insisted that personnel on the Beta Site only be allowed to carry non-lethal sidearms as standard, some bleeding heart kumbaya crap about avoiding making any potential tensions between the locals worse by adding the risk of lethal force to the mix. Personally, Edwards felt that if any of Feretti’s SFs couldn’t manage to carry a gun without the risk of accidentally using or losing it, they weren’t worth the oxygen they were breathing; but he was — nominally at least — the man in charge, and if those were the standing orders, then so be it.

Besides, those orders didn’t say anything about carrying backup clips of live rounds just in case, and Edwards had grown pretty quick at exchanging the red crystal stun rounds for 9mm Parabellums. He was complying with the letter of the orders rather than the spirit of them, perhaps, but he also knew that anyone with any sense would thank him for doing so if one of the local Unas or Tok’ra got out of hand and refused to lie down and fall unconscious as the SFs slung glorified paintballs at them.

His advance through the refugee encampment was especially predatory today, however. He was not a man particularly inclined to play politics, but he was also a man who knew how to get the job done, and within the Stargate Program that was often the best strategy for success. Sometimes the battlefield was an alien world with supercharged plasma raining down from the sky; other times it was a tedious briefing room, and your opponents were bureaucrats and accountants rather than whatever alien zealots the people of Earth had antagonised that week.

In this instance, bureaucracy was not just the best strategy, but also the opponent. While it had been reached through a series of understandable choices and decisions, the leadership here on PB3-865 had become untenable. The facility had too many goals, too many objectives, too many priorities, and lacked the singular leadership of a facility like Stargate Command to wrangle those objectives into a coherent herd. Concessions towards the refugee population ate into the logistics supply lines of his Naquadah acquisition. His own priority was the provision of materials for the construction of Battlecruisers, both here on 865 and back home on Earth: but with the BC-304 commanded by Colonel Ellis close to completion, and the one here on 865 not far behind, soon those resource demands would double — and that was before you even took into account the Atlantis Expedition and their hair-brained Midway space station science project, which might or might not be facing abandonment, depending on how inclined to roll over and give up the folks in Washington and at the IOA were inclined to be. Yet Edwards himself lacked the authority to make calls over which resource drains should take priority, constantly faced with demands from the myriad fellow Colonels that Stargate Command insisted on placing in command of everything, and also lacking the authority to insist upon the additional resources he would need to ever satisfy those demands.

The Stargate Program was a beast with too many heads, here on PB3-865 worst of all — but with the vacancy left by the departing Colonel Davidson lopping off one of those proverbial heads, Edwards was determined to cauterise the wound as best he could, in the hopes that the severed stump wouldn’t somehow manage to grow two more.

Left up to Colonel Edwards, the Stargate Program would dedicate an entire facility to its industrial efforts. It didn’t have to be here: Edwards had no particular animosity towards Colonel Ferretti, he simply understood the importance of his own duties and responsibilities, and the strain placed upon them by the current Beta Site arrangement that hampered his ability to achieve what was needed. If Stargate Command felt an obligation to all these offworlder refugees, then fine: but make that a sole objective of some facility, here or elsewhere. But hampering his efforts to increase and further industrialise the 304 Program’s production methods out of environmental and safety concerns for an alien world and an alien population that the SGC had actively chosen to put there was tying his hands.

Stargate Command knew that. Deep Space Command knew that. The Department of Homeworld Security knew that. The status quo remained the status quo. Which left Colonel Edwards few options. But F-302s and BC-304s were a hot topic item for the International Oversight Advisory these days. Edwards wasn’t particularly enamoured with the idea of them being traded off to the Russians, or the Chinese, or whoever else might have been sniffing around — it was only a moderate relief that the Korolev was one of the Battlecruisers built on Earth, if the Russians had managed to get their greasy paws on the Odyssey he might have felt more incensed by it — it was certainly something they wanted, and these days they held the keys to a significant percentage of the Stargate Program’s budget. The Atlantis Expedition had been the favoured child until now, but with humanity kicked out of their parents’ proverbial apartment, the IOA members were trapped behind the bottleneck of the Cheyenne Mountain Facility, hampered in their efforts to interact with the larger galaxy by the United States Air Force acting as the bouncers at the door. Was that for the best? Perhaps. Who knew what problems the Russians might have created if they’d managed to keep the Korolev intact for more than a few days. But the prospect of that kind of access, and those kinds of opportunities, they were the carrot on a stick that Colonel Edwards planned to dangle in front of the IOA to coax the funding he desperately needed out of their international budgets. As long as Battlecruisers were successfully made, Edwards’ mission was accomplished: let Jack O’Neill worry about trying to keep them all in American hands in the long term.

Edwards noticed the way that the refugees gave him space as he walked. It didn’t please him to see that: he wasn’t a man who actively sought to be disliked, but he was also someone who understood how beneficial that could sometimes be. His actions had trained the locals to remove themselves from his path, and while that wasn’t needed now, it would be a welcome reflex if ever it was.

One tangle of refugees didn’t move, however. In fact, they didn’t seem to notice him at all. His brow furrowed, and his pace quickened. Grunted words drifted across the crisp alien air towards him: not English, not Goa’uld, but Unas; he’d recognise those primitive barks anywhere. A few more strides and the situation came into view: a standoff with one of the volunteer work details. It had been Colonel Ferretti’s idea, to provide the refugees with a sense of purpose by letting them contribute to the operation of the base. Nothing critical, nothing particularly complex — a few crates of raw Naquadah here, a few containers of food and supplies there — but enough to provide a sense of inclusion, a sense of unity, a sense of common purpose. More hippy-dippy hand-holding crap, but Edwards didn’t object: he needed all the hands he could get, and volunteers they could acquire without a single US dollar involved, and that worked for him just fine. Part of him wondered if Ferretti had intended for it to be a peace offering, a compromise to appease his frustration and ease his operation’s logistical struggles. If it had been, he appreciated it. Not enough to express his gratitude, mind you, but certainly enough to recognise it was there.

A snarl curled the scaly, swollen lip of the Unas that seemed central to the whole situation. Edwards recognised him immediately. Iron Shirt. He had a proper name, something in the Unas language with a few too many Ks involved, but Edwards had never found a need to learn it. He was the Alpha of the Unas tribe he and SG-11 had encountered on P3X-403, whose people had agreed to learn Tau’ri techniques and mine Naquadah on their behalf, to avoid Air Force boots tromping all over their sacred terrain. Once again, it was a volunteer arrangement that Edwards was perfectly fine with: if worlds like 403, or Edora, or P3R-636 were willing to trade or gift their Naquadah to the people of Earth, it just meant he could assign his own people elsewhere; more bang for the DOD’s bucks. The whole situation had given Edwards a new appreciation — or at least, a new understanding — of how the Goa’uld had managed to enslave the galaxy so effectively for so long. Apparently in the absence of capitalism, people were unexpectedly happy to work for free — or for beans, in the case of Edora — as long as they felt like they were sticking it to the Goa’uld in the process.

Of course, with the System Lords dying off so rapidly these days, that particular motivation was not long for this world. All the more reason to sell the IOA on the idea of investing, then.

Iron Shirt’s snarling seemed to be directed at one individual in particular: Captain Scott Radner, one of the Marines under Colonel Edwards’ command. He was the kind of officer who got things done without worrying about being nice about it, and Edwards respected that. It caused friction at times, but Edwards could live with that: better to seek forgiveness than ask permission and all that; or perhaps in this case, better to not bother seeking forgiveness at all, because everybody here had a job to do, and should just grow the hell up and get it done.

There was more to it than just the Captain’s personality, though: he’d been one of the Marines that had gated to Atlantis with Colonel Everett — General Everett, he mentally corrected — to help stall for time until the ZPM boosted Daedalus could arrive and fend off the Wraith fleet laying siege to the city. He’d been boots on the ground when the Wraith breached the city, and while he’d come out of the encounter in better shape than Everett himself, the injuries had still been enough to see him shipped home, and the Expedition had never taken him back. No doubt the unceremonious exile of the Atlantis Expedition in recent weeks was the cause of the soured mood Edwards couldn’t help but have noticed.

For what it was worth, he was glad that Radner was still with him: to Edwards’ mind, he had exchanged Major Lorne for Captain Radner, and it felt like an upgrade, not just because Radner had a little more bite to him but also because he’d managed to snag a dose of the Atlantis Expedition’s fancy gene therapy while he’d been there. That played well into another one of Colonel Edwards’ current objectives: convincing Stargate Command, or the IOA, or whoever else would listen to furnish his operations with a few of those Puddlejumper Gateships that the Atlanteans were so fond of. While shifting the Naquadah logistics chain to PB3-865 had done a lot to streamline things, Edwards was still mostly reliant on Naquadah arriving through the Stargate. A few Jaffa allies and a few offworld trading partners were gracious enough to provide delivery via ship, but for the most part that 22 foot ring remained an aggravating bottleneck. Edwards recalled a story about how the space shuttle had been designed with components that were small enough to carry by train, and that train capacity was limited by the width of the rails, which was based on the wheel ruts on roadways left by Roman chariots in England, which in turn were based on the width of a horse’s ass; the width of the Stargate was Edwards’ horse’s ass. Inexplicably, Area 51 had yet to develop Earth’s answer to the Puddlejumper and the Tel’tak: not a problem when you were aboard a Battlecruiser with Asgard beaming technology, he supposed, but thus far the Battlecruiser fleet had been too busy with intergalactic milk runs to be much help with Naquadah shipments; it was Edwards’ hope that with a few Puddlejumpers and a few genetically suitable pilots at his disposal, he could make his life a little easier.

Edwards couldn’t identify what had triggered the confrontation he was witnessing — and didn’t much care — but he could see the escalation involved: Radner’s arms were still by his sides, but the Zat gun he carried was very clearly in his hand rather than his holster. Perhaps it was posturing; Edwards would have understood the impulse if it was, given the towering physique of the Unas glaring down at him. Edwards wondered how the Unas stacked up against the Wraith, how familiar this particular encounter might have been for Captain Radner. His own hand strayed a little closer towards his own sidearm, the other reaching slowly for the pocket where the real bullets were stowed.

He didn’t have the opportunity to act, however. “Lota, lota!” a shrill voice interrupted, the mousy form it belonged to pushing her way through the crowd to interpose herself between Radner and Iron Shirt. “Ka keka, Kor Asek,” she insisted, her hands gesturing in what Edwards almost recognised as American Sign Language. Perhaps it was, or the Unas equivalent thereof; perhaps the woman had simply discovered she had more success if she treated the Unas like gorillas. Either way, something about it seemed to work. “Ka nay. Tar ka nay.”

The Unas they called Iron Shirt — Kor Asek — visibly relaxed as Doctor Susannah Lindsay wriggled her way through the crowd and onto the scene. It didn’t do much to deflate the intimidating aura that the Unas radiated, but it at least diminished the crackling energy in the air between him and Captain Radner, and lessened the anxious feeling in the pit of the Lieutenant’s stomach that she was about to witness someone being shot. This was another new experience, in what had been a difficult eighteen months of new experiences for her: it had begun with a failed audition to join SG-1, then a front row seat to humanity’s first encounter with a Prior of the Ori; then to Atlantis, a narrow escape from abduction by the Ori as a member of Major Lorne’s team; and now here. Go to the Beta Site, Susan, her inner monologue whispered. You’ll be perfectly safe, Susan, there are no monsters there. Sadly that belief had been incorrect, although from her experience, the monsters on PB3-865 were more likely to be the ones in military uniforms than anyone else.

She was not alone, thank goodness. Through the crowd opposite her emerged Chaka — or at least, the Unas that Daniel Jackson had decided to refer to as Chaka, despite the fact that the word actually meant some variation of greeting, farewell, gratitude, or apology depending on where you put the emphasis, and wasn’t the individual’s name at all — who had, ever since Kor Asek agreed to help provide Naquadah for the Stargate Program, been the closest thing the Unas had to an ambassador or diplomatic representative. Doctor Lindsay had met him a few times over the past few weeks, and was keen to spend more time with him: while she was grateful for the insights on Unas language and culture that Doctor Jackson had been kind enough to provide, she found his methodology and conclusions somewhat flawed, and was keen to try and corroborate or dispute them herself. The exodus from Atlantis was still fresh, however, and the delightfully complex yet overwhelming refugee cosmopolis that surrounded the Beta Site had pulled her attention in too many different directions to afford the Unas the kind of time she wished she could spend with them.

It didn’t help that she had spent a not insignificant amount of her time here on PB3-865 missing Major Lorne, her other teammates, the rest of the Expedition, Major Lorne, her Lantean apartment, and Major Lorne, but that was an unbidden and deeply unhelpful thought spiral that she swiftly and frantically buried.

“What is the issue, Captain?”

Lindsay’s tone had turned soft, maintaining the calming undercurrent that she had directed towards Kor Asek, but this time aimed at Captain Radner. Distinctions between the Air Force and Marine Corps aside, the man was a superior officer, and so a level of tact and respect was required, and yet she injected just enough pretend confidence in her words to hopefully illicit the same calm compliance from the Marine that she had achieved from the Unas Alpha.

Radner maintained his dagger-pointed gaze on the Unas, but allowed his head to turn towards the newly arrived Lieutenant just a little. “We have a scheduled incoming wormhole from Stargate Command at the top of the hour. Iron Shirt here seems unwilling to have his people move aside.”

Lindsay’s eyes locked on Chaka, her hands signing in English while her voice did its best attempt at broken Unas. “Chaapa’ai ko tar naya kol,” she explained. Stargate, from humanity’s home. “Ta ka cha a chapaa’ai. Ta kreeka ka cha. Ka —” She trained off, struggling to find the words to convey her sentiment. You cannot stay by the Stargate. You must move away. But why? “Ka tonok tar,” she decided, with a slight wince of apology. You will frighten the Humans.

Obligingly, Chaka huffed out a more elaborate version of Lindsay’s words. Kor Asek nodded along, and something that almost looked like a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth at that final sentiment. “Ma kan,” Kor Asek purred in understanding, agreement, and compliance. “Te ka cha.” We will move.

Without another word, but with one last glance that seemed almost hungry launched towards Captain Radner, Kor Asek bowed his head slightly and then backed away, disappearing off through the encampment towards where his tribesmen were hard at work. Lindsay had seen them on her approach, dutifully unloading the Jaffa-owned Tel’tak that had arrived a few hours earlier, laden with supplies. She bristled a little beneath her olive fatigues: the Unas were doing exactly what was asked and expected of them, and yet were met with nothing but hostility for it. She supposed it was the inevitable reality of things: humanity could barely tolerate their own neighbours, let alone Humans from other worlds, or those almost imperceptibly different like Tok’ra or Jaffa; tolerance of those as distinctly alien as the Unas was sadly expecting too much.

“Not bad,” the voice of Colonel Edwards chimed in, practically a jump scare given the tense situation she’d just diffused. Lindsay had encountered the man almost as infrequently as Chaka, but had none of the same desire to know him beyond the bare minimum.

“I guess you word nerds are good for something after all,” Radner chimed in, chuckling to himself as he slid his zat’nik’tel back into its holster. If Lindsay did not know any better — and based on most of her experiences with marines, it was entirely possible that she did not — it almost seemed like Radner had enjoyed whatever had just transpired. She allowed herself a brief moment to wonder what exactly a personality like that might be compensating for.

“Words are often more effective than guns, Captain,” she offered, toeing the line between respectful and disappointed middle school teacher. “A pity the Marine Corps does not spend more time training its officers to be adept with both.”

Radner looked as if he wanted to retort, but Colonel Edwards slid in first, a hint of a smirk in his voice and at the corner of his mouth. “I’ll pass that along to Colonel Dixon,” he countered. “I’m sure the refugees from 367 would have been much happier if SG-13 had tried to talk their way to safety when the Ori attacked.”

It was a pointed comment, and a targeted one. One of Lindsay’s responsibilities here at the Beta Site was aiding newly arrived refugees in becoming settled and acclimated, determining who out of the extant population was best suited to shoulder and shelter the latest wave. It had only been a few weeks, but with the Ori Crusade growing ever more zealous, there had been no shortage of opportunities for her to witness first-hand the pain and loss and harm the Ori were more than capable of causing. She didn’t let it diminish her, however; her posture managed to find an extra inch or so as she squared off against the Colonel.

“Perhaps the Ori needn’t attack at all. We seem overly eager to defeat ourselves.”

It was a salient point, and Edwards conceded it with a subtle nod of his head. “Get to the gate, Radner,” he ordered, drawing things to a close before the Captain got it into his head to try and escalate things again. “I’m sure Colonel Ferretti is planning on having a detail present, and I want to make sure that the new arrivals recognise that we’re here as well.”

Radner’s shoulders squared in compliance, and a brief sir was offered as he dismissed himself and disappeared. Colonel Edwards lingered for a moment longer, letting the hint of a smile find a bit more purchase on his lips. “Lieutenant,” he offered in farewell, before he too set off at a far more casual pace, towards the soon to be active Stargate.

Lindsay felt the presence of Chaka step into the void beside her that the Colonel left behind. “Cha’aka,” she offered, with as much appropriate reverence as she could muster: not his nom de guerre but the drawn out, lengthened form of the word that conveyed her gratitude for his assistance.

“Ka urrurrash?” he offered, a note of question in his voice.

“Ma kan,” Lindsay agreed. Urrurrash was a term of respect, a description of a leader worthy of that authority. George Hammond. Hank Landry. Evan Lorne. Ka flipped the sentiment on its head. “Zo Edwards a ka urrurrash.”

Chaka offered a solemn nod as he processed her words. “Wok tah?”

Lindsay smiled at the almost sweetness of Chaka’s offer to take care of the problem for her. “Ka keka,” she said, and signed; don’t hurt him. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she thought about it for a moment longer. “Ta lota keka,” she clarified. Don’t hurt him yet.

A grunt of laughter escaped from the Unas, and he flashed his teeth in a toothy grin.

Chapter Text

Choice was a fickle thing. There were those who liked to say that choice was an illusion, but the melodrama only expressed a small part of the story. Sometimes it felt as if you were left with no choice. Sometimes it felt as if choices were being made for you. Sometimes it felt as if your choices were meaningless, an arbitrary indifference between your options, or a negligible impact no matter what you did. The truth, however, was that there was always a choice. It was a state of mind, not a state of action: one chose to act, one chose to comply, even when it felt as if matters were beyond your control. No matter how much agency you felt that you were lacking, there was always a choice, even if it was only in how you chose to engage with your circumstances.

It was a choice then that had brought Shen Xiaoyi to Stargate Command today, even though it had felt as if she had no choice. That ultimatum was not the result of her government, however, nor of the IOA: they had in fact been quite determined to assure her that she could choose not to go on this particular endeavour. It was believed that, for the prospective new Indian, Canadian, and Japanese delegates to the International Oversight Advisory, a visit to the Beta Site would be most valuable: an opportunity to see aspects of the Stargate Program with which they might not be familiar, even for those who had stepped through the Stargate previously. The new Russian delegate had requested the same opportunity, having been aware of the Stargate Program for years, but never having experienced it through the lens of American operations.

But the IOA had been quite clear that the expedition would not be mandatory, an excuse that Russel Chapman and Jean LaPierre had been keen to embrace. She did not blame them: the last time the IOA had attempted an offworld tour such as this, she and they had found themselves stranded at the Gamma Site, fleeing for their lives from a flesh-eating insect plague that could swarm through the very ground beneath them. If any of them had made the choice to never venture beyond Earth’s comforting gravity again, no one would have blamed them, nor judged them. It would have been the choice that Xiaoyi herself might have made, had you asked her to make it mere weeks ago. But Richard Woolsey had also been among their number, and he had — without fear, or at least, without the overt appearance of it — not only ventured to another world, but to another galaxy on behalf of the IOA, functioning as a sole representative of humanity within the lost city of the Ancients from which their Atlantis Expedition had been so summarily dismissed.

That Woolsey had been permitted to serve as their envoy had not been an entirely welcome choice. While Woolsey himself certainly had the most experience out of the current assortment of international representatives, the idea of an American speaking on behalf of humanity did not sit well with many on the IOA, the Russians least of all, and the Chinese government was of late quite keen to back the Russians in any moves or grievances that might slacken the American stranglehold on the Stargate and the technological access it provided. That concern had influenced the selection of India and Japan’s prospective new representatives: Leela Bryce and Miko Kusanagi, two orphans from the Atlantis Expedition whose offworld experience and extraterrestrial knowledge would quickly make them the experts in the room, and who had already served as de facto representatives on behalf of their nations among the Atlantis community for the last several years.

The Russians’ new delegate had been chosen for similar reasons: following the tragic death of Colonel Chekov, the IOA had gently insisted that they would prefer his replacement be a civilian rather than another military officer, and so Russia had dutifully responded with Doctor Svetlana Markov, a woman whose expertise in all things Stargate was undeniable, and whose role in Russia’s own short-lived Stargate Program was certain to put the Americans on the defensive. Xiaoyi could not help but wonder if the gesture was intended to have an effect on Chinese attitudes as well: while the Russians’ own aspirations for control over the Stargate had largely been appeased by being handed the keys to the Battlecruiser Korolev, Doctor Markov served as a reminder that the United States were not the only nation with the knowledge and resources to operate their own Stargate Program, should anyone somehow succeed in liberating the Stargate from America’s grasp.

But those choices were the domain of other people: the choice that brought Shen Xiaoyi to sublevel 28 of the Cheyenne Mountain Facility today was her own. It did not matter to her that the IOA and Chinese government alike would have been content had she not visited the Beta Site on this occasion, it mattered to her that she go for her own sake. It was not something as pedestrian as proving herself, or overcoming fear: it was about stepping up, about measuring up, about achieving the pinnacle for herself both professionally and personally. It was all well and good for her to sit across a table from Richard Woolsey and measure his worthiness or lack thereof for the opportunities presented to him, but these choices and circumstances would persist unless she herself chose to alter things. It was within her power to choose to be the kind of IOA representative who was seen and remembered. It was within her power to become a name that was included in such matters without a second thought. Richard Woolsey did what Richard Woolsey did, because who else but him could? It was within Xiaoyi’s power to choose to be the answer to that question.

It was also within her power to choose that things go differently. Yes, the disaster at the Gamma Site had largely beyond anyone’s control — a foolish moment of curiosity compounded by the malevolent contingencies of the Priors and the Ori — but she and her peers had still made choices. They had chosen to regard it as a trivial, bureaucratic expedition. They had chosen to step through the Stargate in their business suits with their disinterested attitudes, viewing it as an opportunity to fuel their critique of Stargate Command and little else beyond that.

Xiaoyi tugged at the Atlantis Expedition uniform that she had requested the SGC provide: not quite the right fit for her, and unfamiliarly uncomfortable compared to her usual attire, but infinitely more practical than the pant suit and heels she had been forced to flee through forests and caves and rocky terrain in the last time she had stepped through the Stargate. There was an ancillary effect as well, a choice on her part to resemble the similar attire of Doctors Bryce and Kusanagi, to play dress up as an administrator of the Atlantis Expedition and perhaps sow the seeds that, should humanity ever return to the lost city of the Ancients, Elizabeth Weir might not be the only woman qualified to lead them.

She wondered for a moment if she might have felt more comfortable with a gun. Unlike the Americans that usually graced this facility, she had not emerged from the womb with genetic aspirations to be a gunslinging outlaw in the Wild West, and so the prospect of being armed did not have a particularly default appeal, yet she could not shake the haunting feeling of powerlessness that had weighted upon her in that alien cave, knowing that to her frustration and dismay it was SG-1 of all people who were once again living up to their infuriating reputation as the heroes of Earth’s interstellar experience. When they had first left for the Gamma Site, it had seemed like tedious posturing that the Pentagon had sent SG-1 to safeguard them; Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, Teal’c, and even Cameron Mitchell had quickly proven that their reputation was indeed earned.

Yet in this instance, the IOA had explicitly requested that Stargate Command not be involved in providing their protection. On a surface level, it was part of the official reprimand that the IOA had issued regarding the Gamma Site incident — not a genuine grievance, but tedious adherence to protocol and procedure was where the IOA thrived, after all — and the SGC’s part in allowing it to happen. It would not fit the narrative if Stargate Command were allowed a second opportunity to repeat the same mistakes. Perhaps there was an element of letting the SGC off the hook as well: with the war against the Ori ever-worsening, SG-1 and their sibling teams had far more pressing matters to focus upon. But there was almost an element of posturing. Part of their escort was being provided by the nations represented here: Doctor Markov, Doctor Kusanagi, and Luthor Dovelock from Canada had each arrived with an individual escort of sorts, someone whose priority was their personal protection rather than the group at large. Xiaoyi was also pleased to see that Major Hules — a soldier from the British SAS who perhaps cut an even more imposing figure than Teal’c had — would be providing a de facto presence from the United Kingdom on this hopefully uneventful excursion. The remainder of their escort had been provided by the Central Intelligence Agency and various companion agencies, whose role in the Stargate Program thus far had been one of scrutiny and accountability. It was a reminder to Stargate Command that even within their own nation there were organizations that superseded them; and for the IOA, it was perhaps a rehearsal of things to come, a tentative first step in becoming something more than a passive and powerless fiscal body.

It did not escape Xiaoyi’s notice that the leader of the CIA delegation was still absent, however. Sergeant Bates, late of the United States Marine Corps, and Agent Cross of the NID were armed, ready, and waiting, but Agent Burke was nowhere to be seen. Biding his time for a dramatic entrance, no doubt, Americans did seem to be rather fond of those.

Of all the things Burke had expected when he arrived at Stargate Command, What colour will your team be wearing today, sir? had not been one of them. It made sense, he supposed. It was a decision that needed to be made by someone, somewhere, at some point. Burke had always just assumed there were rules and protocols for such things, default answers that avoided the question needing to be asked. Camouflage when you needed to be sneaky, desert drab for when you needed to be sneaky and there was a lot of sand, olive drab for everything else. But perhaps it was naive to think that the other side of a wormhole was that easy to quantify. After all, the Stargate here on Earth was buried deep underneath a mountain: peek through the gate at a world like this one, and there was no way of knowing if what awaited you on the surface was Arizona, Siberia, or Vancouver.

None of that mattered today, though — they knew exactly where the wormhole was going — and so Burke had settled upon black. Sure, there had been a part of him that craved the full experience of stepping through the Stargate in that classic SG-1 green, but it felt like appropriation somehow. While he was finally here, finally about to set eyes on the Stargate for the first time, he hadn’t lost sight of the fact that he was here as an outsider, and there were both responsibilities and expectations of that. Everyone would know that the IOA had brought the CIA, and there was nothing to be gained by trying to hide that underneath fashion choices that made everyone seem a little more at home. Black was what the CIA Task Force wore on operations, it was what Pentagon strike teams wore whenever they were backing up the SGC on missions out and about on Earth; black would work for them just fine.

Besides, black made the headwear situation much easier to deal with. Matching a black hat with black fatigues was relatively easy; try to do the same with something like green, and odds were high that you’d end up with some kind of weird inexplicable mismatch. Burke had accepted the fact that he’d be perceived as an outsider on this little family outing of theirs, but he refused to be seen as an uncoordinated one.

The locker made a satisfying clunk as he pushed it closed, and for the first time in several minutes he allowed himself to look in a direction other than directly ahead. To his relief, Sarah Gardner was not only fully clothed, but also looked pretty much ready to go, seemingly working her way through the mandatory existential crisis that was the final step of preparation for any sort of mission like this. He found a smile for her, but utterly fumbled at his attempts to find anything reassuring to say.

“You good?”

“More or less,” she lied, returning a practised smile of her own, once again tugging awkwardly at the hang of her military issue outfit. It did not help that the military’s approach to one-size-fits-most fashion was to make something vaguely rectangular that fit everyone equally poorly, but there seemed to be more to it than that. While a questioning frown didn’t quite make it to Burke’s features in time, she acted as if it had. “When one has lived as a genderless megalomaniacal sociopath with delusions of grandeur, five thousand years of stasis, and an opportunity to experience female-presenting fashion for the first time, one gets accustomed to things that Earth’s clothing industry tends not to match.”

“Well, you look great,” Burke blurted out, the reflexive response tumbling out before his brain even had the opportunity to process the full implications of what she’d just shared. Typical Burke, running his mouth without thinking, responding as if she was a date and had just asked if she looked okay, rather than someone who had just opened up the tiniest bit about the monumental and unimaginable trauma that lurked behind her every thought and action. He floundered frantically for a way to recover. “You look like you belong.”

The faintest hint of recoil tugged at Sarah’s expression and posture, not disgust, or even surprise at the words themselves, but surprise at the way the words made her feel. As she blinked, Burke almost thought he saw a faint hint of added shimmer in her eyes as they snagged a little extra of the locker room’s dim ambient light.

Burke pressed on before either of them felt obligated to dwell on that particular can of worms any longer. “Gateroom is this way,” he said, unnecessarily — it wasn’t as if the locker room had multiple exits — and tried to ignore how naked he felt being geared up like this without a familiar weight of a weapon to hang on his shoulders and keep his hands occupied. Apparently an Airman in the gateroom was holding onto that for him for now, and he was just supposed to accept that it was a perfectly normal and reasonable way to do things, and act like he didn’t want to have dismantled, checked, and cleaned it himself to make sure that everything was a-ok. Maybe that as just him being weird, maybe that was him being so accustomed to self sufficiency that he’d forgotten what it was like having other competent and responsible people around, or maybe Stargate Command was just weird. He tried not to think about it as he led his way out into the corridor.

The gateroom was thankfully easy to find — he’d come across the similar idea of painted lines on the floor when he’d transferred through Frankfurt Airport one time, and it delighted a very particular part of his brain to imagine Stargate Command functioning with a similar mentality — despite the confusing labyrinth of tunnels beneath Cheyenne Mountain. If there was a rhyme or reason to why some of them were round, others were square with the top corners missing, or why this last one alongside the control room was only missing one of it’s corners, Burke hadn’t figured it out yet, but was also a little too committed to the idea of seeming like he knew what he was doing to actually ask anyone something quite that dumb.

He halted just beyond the threshold for Sarah to fall into step beside him. “Are you ready?” he asked; his mind whispered back: Are you?

Rather than take the question as rhetorical, however, or respond with some sort of platitude response, Sarah seemed to give the question genuine thought. Her eyes focused on the ground rather than at him, but Burke could feel that he was undeniably the subject of her full attention. “Why am I here, Agent Burke?” His stomach squirmed at the faint moment of pause. “Why am I really here? Don’t tell me I’m just a crutch for your imposter syndrome, we both know there are far less controversial sources of Stargate trivia than a former Goa’uld System Lord.”

Burke disliked the scrutiny. It was an odd contradiction at the core of his being: he hated being ignored, but hated being seen even more. He did things because they felt like the right choice, but didn’t like to be called out on them, didn’t like to have his motivations questioned, or challenged, or scrutinised. That kind of thing led to awkward angry heart to heart conversations with old friends in the middle of Honduran jungles. Better a lie at your own expense than a truth that brought hurt and harm to people you cared about. Better a dead friend and a black mark on your record so that everyone who knew them and loved them could mourn the man they’d thought he was, than expose a truth that would force their family to pay for their bad choices. That was the kind of guy that Burke had always been, willing to take the fall or the brunt of the blame if that’s what was needed, a self-sacrificing human shield of a person who would have made even the Secret Service feel inadequate about their willingness to take bullets.

Sarah was different, but not really. He didn’t know her, but he saw her — or rather, saw something of himself in her situation, and couldn’t stop himself from immediately trying to fall on his sword in a way that might be vaguely helpful.

“Jack O’Neill and I go way back,” he explained, as succinctly and vaguely as he could manage. “Not necessarily in a good way. I made a hard choice back in the day. Made it for the right reasons, but I couldn’t ever admit to it, and I had to live with the consequences. When Jack finally found out, when he finally understood, he gave me a second chance and here I am.”

Burke shrugged, as if the choices that had reshaped his entire life were utterly trivial.

“I’m a big fan of second chances. Big fan of people getting what they deserve. You, down there in that little office?” A grimace tugged at his features. “Doesn’t feel fair to me. Some alien stole you, trashed your life, and you’re stuck living with the consequences like it was your fault? That’s messed up. That doesn’t sit right with me.”

His attention drifted from her for a moment, towards the assembled delegation waiting for his arrival, just beyond the gateroom doors. “Things are changing around here. I’m not sure where things with the IOA are going, but they’re definitely going somewhere. For some reason, the opportunity to hitch my wagon to that landed in my lap, and I would have felt like an asshole if I didn’t scooch over and make room for someone who deserves to be here far more than I do.”

Sarah nodded slowly, quietly, processing Burke’s words. “Thank you for answering honestly, Agent Burke.”

The implied but unspoken but was deafening.

“I’m sure you can understand, however, that given my situation, my choices and my agency matter to me a great deal. I do appreciate the gesture that you were covertly trying to make, but I would have preferred it if you had been upfront with me, and let me make an informed decision for myself.”

It was a punch to the gut, and one that Burke unquestionably deserved. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like having an alien consciousness in your mind, puppeteering your actions: it was bad enough doing shady things while under orders from the military or the CIA, unfathomably worse to not even have enough control over yourself to know that you had made the choice to pull the trigger. All of that, and then to be freed of it, only to have your own species tell you where to go and how to live, to be treated like a threat because of choices that hadn’t been yours? In his eagerness to both help and to hide the fact that he was trying to do so, he had inadvertently subjected her to exactly the kind of overbearing interference that he’d thought he was helping to uplift her from.

“Understood,” he said quietly; there was nothing more to be said, nothing to be gained by an excuse disguised as an apology. She was right. He was wrong. Nothing left to do but sit with that. “It’s not too late,” he offered, “If you want to sit this thing out. This is on me, I’ll come up with a reason. Maybe an opportunity for you to spend some time with Doctor Jackson —“

“You didn’t give me the chance,” Sarah cut in, cutting Burke off as her eyes finally abandoned the floor and sought out his, “But that does not mean I would not have agreed to come anyway.” Her focus on him lingered, as if studying his expression and peering beyond it into his soul to decide if she felt he had taken her words to heart sufficiently. “Now hurry up and scooch, Agent Burke. Our wagon is waiting.”

A new sense of confidence coloured Agent Burke’s poise as he strode and swaggered his way into the gateroom, any semblance of doubt and regret thoroughly buried beneath a lopsided grin. His eyes took in the awaiting IOA delegation. While he had thoroughly studied each dossier the CIA had provided, it only now dawned on him how many of them were women. Markov, Voronkova, Xiaoyi, Kusanagi, Burke — save for Dovelock, and with the addition of Sarah Gardner, this was beginning to feel more like being the chaperone for a bachelorette party than some dry and disinteresting babysit the bureaucracy assignment.

That was even before factoring in the group from Area 51, too. His briefing hadn’t gone into too much detail about their presence, something about more manpower — womanpower? — to help with some kind of spaceship deflector shield gizmo. It was all dilithium crystals and flux capacitors to him, so his brain had mostly glazed over, but still. Things had apparently come a long way since his pre-CIA days of being in the military full time. 21st Century for the win.

“Good morning, Angels,” he heard himself say, and immediately regretted it, focusing on the task of figuring out which Airman was holding onto his M4, and going through the awkward process of transferring it from their grasp onto the harness draped around his shoulders.

“Good morning, Charlie,” a voice replied — one of the Russians, to his surprise. He hadn’t studied the photographs long enough to recognise which one at a mere glance, but the fact that they’d replied at all felt deeply interesting. Apparently Russian women were allowed to have a sense of humour, unlike most of the Russian men he’d come across over the course of his career. This particular cake walk, milk run, or whatever other kind of grocery-related expedition they were about to embark on was rapidly starting to seem a lot more fun.

Weapon acquired, he shuffled over to Bates and Cross, offering a silent nod to the Sergeant and the NID Agent with whom he’d worked before. If memory served, Bates had been on Atlantis until a run-in with one of those creepy space vampires he’d read about had seen him sent home; whereas Cross had been involved in some kind of dubious alien snake cloning, sleepy townsfolk body-snatching escapade that the NID had run — one of the many shady NID exploits that the CIA Task Force had scrutinised for potential links to The Trust and its own Goa’uld shenanigans. Apparently being tangled up in Shenanigans A was enough to convince the CIA that you weren’t also involved with Shenanigans B, and his expertise had been deemed useful enough to make him a viable NID liaison. No one back at the Task Force seemed to trust him all that much, but then Burke supposed that as a member of the NID, he was probably pretty used to that by now.

His attention shifted to the two tactical-clad figures he didn’t recognise: Sergeant Connie Smith and Corporal Ren Yamato, conveniently easy to tell apart thanks to the flags attached to their Atlantis Expedition uniforms with velcro, among other things. “Nice to meet you,” he offered, with a quick dose of warmth, receiving nothing but a curt nod in reply.

Any further conversation was cut off by a tremendous mechanical rumbling sound that Burke probably couldn’t have found the words for if you’d given him a century or more to think about it. It was only then did he turn, his attention shifting from the people he was charged with to the proverbial elephant in the room, watching as the Stargate he’d heard and read so much about began to slowly spin its way into life before his very eyes, steam hissing, chevrons clanking, dangling from assemblage of electrical gadgetry that would have made Doctor Frankenstein proud. “Chevron 1 encoded,” a voice from above announced ominously over the PA, whatever the hell that meant.

“Oh damn,” Burke whispered softly, eyes fixated on the science fiction spectacle before him.

A grin broke onto the Canadian Sergeant’s face as she took a step forward. She barely came past Burke’s shoulder, and yet carried herself with a swagger that suggested she routinely knocked men twice his size on their asses without so much as breaking a sweat. “First time?”

Burke nodded, wordlessly, as Chevrons 2 and 3 encoded themselves, mind struggling to wrap itself around the concept that the gateroom’s futuristic centerpiece was thousands — or was it millions? — of years old. He couldn’t even begin to fathom all the talk of superconductors, and wormholes, and interstellar distances: that this thing even existed at all felt impossible beyond words.

Sergeant Smith’s lopsided smile seemed to brighten with genuine delight. “We’re not even at the best part, yet.”

Under normal circumstances, Burke would have noticed and wondered why Chevron 7 was locked instead of encoded, but for now he was too distracted by the explosion of light, and sound, and force; by the burst of almost water-like energy that surged towards him, driving a concussive wave of air ahead of it that washed across him like a breeze. He flinched, and didn’t even try to hide it, leaning into it with an elated chuckle. “Hot damn,” he added softly, glancing over at the Sergeant who had apparently adopted him, significantly less phased and yet somehow still a little mesmerised by the sight. “I guess you do this a lot, huh?”

“Yep,” the Sergeant agreed, shooting Burke a quick quirk of her eyebrows, and another resurgence of smile.

“Does it ever get old?”

“Nope.”

Burke could have stood and stared at the Stargate for hours, watching the way the surface rippled like water. He wondered what it felt like, wondered what it even was, realised that the answers to both were available to him right there in that room and yet he couldn’t bring himself to ruin the magic by trying to understand how it worked. Apparently Stargate Command wasn’t keen on letting him stand around wondering about it, either. “Beta Site signals you are all clear,” the same voice as before announced; Burke glanced above him, and noticed that the General was conspicuously absent, this apparently far too routine a use of the Stargate to be worth his time.

“You heard the man,” Burke announced, after a moment of pause before he’d realised that he was the one everyone expected to take charge. He cracked his neck from side to side before striding confidently forward, feeling in his periphery as his team began to fall in step behind him, and usher their bureaucratic charges into his wake. “Last one to the Beta Site buys lunch.”

A Russian curse tumbled out under Voronkova’s breath as the sudden impact of being corporeal once again drove the air from her lungs and caused her to half-stumble her first step upon an alien world. She felt a strong yet gentle hand grab her arm, Doctor Markov quick to help her hide the momentary lack of poise from anyone who might have seen.

Voronkova was grateful for the assistance, but embarrassed that it was necessary. She had her detractors in Moscow, particularly after the incident with General Kiselev and the perilous proximity the United States and the Russian Federation had reached to the brink of nuclear war, but she had ingratiated herself with enough of Colonel Chekov’s colleagues and contacts that, when the IOA had demanded a civilian representative instead of a military officer, Voronkova had been perfectly positioned to become their aide and advisor. There was a strange irony to it: the same opinions that considered her too junior and too sympathetic to Stargate Command to have replaced Colonel Chekov directly had made her an ideal candidate for the bureaucratically inferior role of being Doctor Markov’s pet officer.

It was an arrangement that suited Voronkova just fine. She had stood beside Colonel Chekov for years, watching as he shouldered the complex and competing burdens of his military and political obligations, while at the same time understanding the realities of the Stargate Program and interstellar politics far better than anyone in any position of actual power. It was an eternal struggle of being caught in the middle, trying to squeeze every last iota of cooperation out of the Americans while trying to hold back a tidal wave of unrealistic expectation from his superiors in Moscow, constantly aware that neither side looked upon him favourably for it.

She had been surprised when Colonel Chekov had decided to take command of the Korolev personally, and yet at the same time it had not surprised her at all. After years of being caught between those nations and expectations, the Korolev had presented him with an opportunity to act, to do, to participate, a rare opportunity to directly control the circumstances that were usually so far beyond his reach.

It was an opportunity that Voronkova wished he desperately hadn’t taken. He was a soldier, as he was, and so to die in the defence of his country — much less his planet, his galaxy — was a possibility that he had accepted. It did not make his loss any less tragic, nor the loss of the one hundred and eighty-seven other lives who had died aboard the Korolev. Yet it was tragic to her, in an acute and personal way, and Voronkova wondered if it was a loss that she was alone in feeling. The Americans had experienced similar losses, and while Colonel Pendergast and Colonel Emerson were no doubt fine officers, she had her doubts that anyone at Stargate Command would consider Colonel Chekov an equitable loss.

Those thoughts were what dwelt at the forefront of her mind as she studied her surroundings, finding the distant silhouette of PB3-865’s next BC-304 Battlecruiser looming on the horizon. She had provided Doctor Markov with many justifications on why she should accompany her on this visit to the Beta Site, everything from the practical benefits to her duties as military attaché to the potential optics of the Russian civilian and military presences being perceived as a united front. Markov had agreed, and hadn’t challenged those excuses, but Voronkova suspected she did not believe them. In truth, this visit was something more personal, a pilgrimage of sorts. The Korolev and Colonel Chekov with it were nothing but atoms and debris now, suspended in space for eternity in proximity to P3Y-229: no graves, no monuments, no memorial to the mentor that Voronkova had lost. To be here, to stand upon the bridge of a ship akin to the one where Chekov had spent his final moments, that would bring her the closure she had been seeking these past months.

Or at least, that was her hope.

First, however, was the obstacle of bureaucracy. For that, Voronkova tore her attention away from the distant construction, and focused on the Beta Site before her. The IOA delegates and their escorts were ushered forward, siphoned aside and away from the gate to make room for Colonel Gant and the science team from Area 51. While other members of the delegation likely thought that they were the most important people here, both Voronkova and Markov agreed that the scientists who had shared a wormhole with them were far more critical arrivals. While the nature of their work was obscured somewhat by American secrecy, and while the science of it all eluded her somewhat, the core premise of their mission was clear: find a way to help Earth’s Battlecruisers survive against the Ori. That was a goal that Voronkova understood painfully well.

Were it not so adjacent to her own personal pain, Voronkova might have found something noble, even inspirational about it. The scientists from Area 51 were only the latest additions to a project that boasted scientists not just from Earth but from offworld as well. Jonas Quinn, the Tok’ra, the Asgard, veterans of Atlantis; even American capitalism had contributed, in the form of exiled former billionaire Alec Colson, the technologies of half a dozen different races combining together in a desperate attempt not to create a weapon, but to create a shield.

Voronkova couldn’t help but watch them, study them, long to gravitate towards them. But they were there, and she was here. They were practicality, she was politics.

The event horizon behind them burst, and a sense of stillness settled across the immediate vicinity. It did nothing to dislodge the ambient chaos of the Beta Site itself, but such things were inescapable. It at least provided enough of an approximation of quiet for the base’s commander to feel like he had the opportunity to speak.

“Welcome to PB3-865,” Colonel Louis Ferretti, formerly of SG-2, greeted warmly. “I realise that for some of you, stepping through the Stargate to another world is just another Tuesday, but for others this is their first time setting foot on a planet other than Earth, so please forgive us here at the Beta Site for wanting to make things a little bit special.”

Voronkova felt Ferretti’s eyes catch hers as he sought out the members of the group to whom his words applied. She didn’t enjoy that. Her duties had not afforded her the opportunity to travel offworld before now, and while that was understandable under the circumstances, it did not change the fact that it set her apart from the assembled group, reminding her of how out of place she felt among them. Yes, she had years of familiarity with the Stargate Program, but beside the woman who had helped run Russia’s own program, or those from other nations who had spent months or years in another galaxy? It was hard not to feel like an imposter alongside people with such pedigree. For a moment, she allowed herself to feel glad for the comparative naïveté of Edmund Burke and Luthor Dovelock: at least by comparison to them, she could feel like a veteran of sorts.

“I’m sure you all have your own ideas of why you’re here, but what matters most to me is that when you leave the Beta Site tomorrow, it is with a better understanding of what we do here, and why we matter. Yes, we are a military installation. Yes, we build Battlecruisers here.”

Voronkova fought the urge to let her gaze follow Ferretti’s gesture back towards the silhouette it had dwelt upon before.

“But more important than our assets are our people. To that end, I have invited a few representatives of our refugee population and our offworld trading partners to meet with you, and hopefully put a Human, Jaffa, or otherwise face on the funding we keep asking you to sign off on. If you’d be kind enough to follow me —”

The group began to stir and shuffle as Colonel Ferretti began to lead them away from the Stargate and into the refugee encampment beyond, but Voronkova felt Doctor Markov’s grasp on her arm once again, preventing her from following along. “I think it would be prudent,” she offered softly, “If my military advisor were to check in on the progress of the shield project, da?”

Voronkova wasn’t accustomed to the gentleness of her tone, somehow managing to sound kind without seeming soft or weak, a stark contrast to the career military voices she spent so much of her time in Moscow hearing. She shifted herself just enough to reciprocate Markov’s grasp, letting a grateful moment of silence pass between them. “Da, Doctor Markov. As you wish.”

Chapter Text

18 Months Ago…

The alien crimson sky of Dakara hung ominously over the Ancient monument where the Jaffa had first been created, as if perpetually bathed in the blood that had been shed that day, and on all the days of war since. Among the foothills of the imposing stone spire, the Jaffa worked tirelessly to turn the literally Ancient ruins into a thriving city, columns and colonnades that wouldn’t have felt out of place in Ancient Rome now standing proudly atop the rusty, almost Martian terrain of this utterly alien world. On the horizon, the silhouette of a pair of Goa’uld cargo ships heaved salvaged masonry into place, rescued from fallen buildings that had crumbled into ruin long before the Human race had even begun to evolve. At the center of it all stood the Stargate, through which the Ancient monument itself had beamed salvation from the Replicators to every corner of the Milky Way at once, dwarfed by its surroundings and yet somehow the undeniable focus, like a gladiator standing alone in one of the colosseums of old.

The whine of a Death Glider’s ion propulsion screeched through the air above. Colonel Cameron Mitchell flinched, and hated himself for it. It was just an aircraft, no more or less worthy of exceptional fear than any other, despite what the Goa’uld nomenclature asserted, and yet it had become the soundtrack to his suffering, the sound that screamed at him from his memories as he drifted off to sleep, wrenching him back to consciousness from fleeting memories of pain, and smoke, and ice.

He whispered a curse under his breath to the Dakara soil, like a tree in the forest, confident that there was no one around and fluent enough in Tau’ri languages to hear it. The Death Glider was just the cherry atop this shit sundae of Sundays, one last jab from the cosmos to ensure that he understood that this waste of time was even more monumental than the vista that surrounded him. He had known that General Landry was humouring him when he approved Mitchell’s request to piggyback on a routine dial-in to the Beta Site, and then gate onwards from there to the new Jaffa homeworld. Perhaps Landry would have denied the request if Mitchell had asked to spend US taxpayer dollars on his fool’s errand, and perhaps on some level Mitchell had already accepted that when he’d suggested his tax-free Beta Site workaround. But part of him still clung to the hope that maybe things would work out, that some higher power would intervene and provide a reason for SG-1 to set aside their expeditions to Atlantis and their aspirations for social change, and actually agree to be the team that he had striven and struggled so hard to become part of. They had their reasons, and he respected that, but it was hard not to take it personally.

”Imposter syndrome’s a bitch,” he muttered to himself, his hands reaching for the Dial Home Device and beginning to punch in the chevron sequence that would return him to Earth.

Suddenly he stopped, hesitated, the words of Teal’c of Chulak rumbling in the back of his mind. I can offer some names of those I consider to be honourable warriors. His mind had tried to launch the recollection as further ammunition against himself: after all, what honourable warriors did Teal’c know that weren’t already equally entangled with the efforts to establish the Free Jaffa Nation? But then the back of his mind had slowly begun to consider it, like a laptop installing updates in the background as he’d stumbled his way around Dakara’s unreasonably stair-filled corridors in search of the Stargate. For someone like Teal’c, warrior was a term of respect, one he was just as likely to apply to the men and women he’d fought alongside at Stargate Command as to one of his Jaffa brothers.

Not just Stargate Command, either. Teal’c had fought alongside allies of Earth from many worlds, and while the fleeting concept of an Asgard in a little SGC uniform was something his mind would definitely circle back to and dwell on later, more pressing was the realisation that Mitchell had forgotten something — someone — of acute importance.

Hand pressing into the center dome of the DHD to cancel the half-finished dialling sequence, Mitchell delved into the depths of his memory, and tried to dredge up the gate address for Langara.

Jonas Quinn let out a sigh, thumb and fingers digging into his eye sockets, the pen clasped between index and middle narrowly avoiding his forehead as he tried to grind the frustration out of his brain. The numbers simply were not adding up, just as they had not been for weeks, just as they had not been since the destruction of the Battlecruiser Korolev had turned Stargate Command desperate, and brought them knocking on his door once again.

He had declined Colonel Cameron Mitchell’s invitation to rejoin SG-1 when he’d first asked. Jonas had his reasons, both public and personal, but truth be told he had just moved on. A small part of him had been hurt that, after Colonel O’Neill’s promotion to General, Colonel Carter hadn’t reached out to invite him into the newly vacant fourth spot. He likely would have said no then, too, and perhaps Sam had known or assumed that, but part of him still wished he’d been asked — and Colonel Mitchell had asked, albeit a year late through no fault of his own.

Jonas hadn’t lied to Mitchell when he’d declined, either. He’d left out the hurt feelings, sure, but the reasons he’d given were compelling and accurate. Ultimately, he just didn’t — hadn’t — known what his people would do without him. For all the strides that Langara had made in the few years since Anubis and his mothership had appeared in the skies above Kelowna, progress remained slow. His people had accepted that the Stargate was a valuable resource, but they still thought of it in simplistic terms, still locked in the mindset of international tensions and potential leverage to use against foreign neighbours. They didn’t see, or perhaps more accurately didn’t care about the potential for exploration and scientific discovery, the potential for their growth as a people and as a society if they began to reach out and share themselves with entire new worlds full of other Humans with different viewpoints. In the past, fear of provoking the Goa’uld the way that Earth had was a powerful motivator for Langara to keep itself quiet and unnoticed. But by now, Stargate Command had taken care of most of the System Lords, and the Replicators had kindly eliminated most of the rest. The Jaffa were free, enslaved humanity was free, and the galaxy was — or should have been — safer than ever.

So Jonas had declined: because as slow and frustrating as progress had been, he still had hope. The moment was ripe for his people to finally step out amongst the stars, and he was uniquely poised to play an integral, essential part of it. Instead of being Earth’s surrogate for an absent Daniel Jackson, he had the opportunity to be his own people’s Jonas Quinn.

Then the Ori had come. Langara had been one of the first worlds visited after Ori ships had arrived through the Supergate at P3Y-229, and the sight of another alien ship looming in the skies above Kelowna had reawakened old fears. Jonas had urged, desperately, that his people reach out to the Tau’ri, the Tok’ra, the Jaffa: join hands with their fellow sentient beings who should all have been stood united against a common and overwhelming threat. Instead, the politicians of his world had preached isolationism. There was a flightless bird that Jonas had read about during his time on Earth, which — idiomatically, although not literally — was said to bury its head in the sand to hide from predators. Out of sight, out of mind, another Tau’ri saying condemning the mentality that his world’s government had effectively made their official policy.

When Colonel Mitchell had contacted him the second time, the man had been much harder to ignore, and not just because of Jonas’ disappointment in his own people, either. The Cameron Mitchell who had attempted to recruit him eighteen months ago had been bright-eyed and optimistic, eager to please and to prove himself, almost a little too akin to the man Jonas frequently found in the mirror, if he was being honest with himself. But after the Korolev, Colonel Mitchell had seemed haunted. The more Jonas had learned about him, the more the pieces had fallen into place. Mitchell, a man whose F-302 had been shot down during the Battle of Antarctica, had watched the destruction of the Prometheus — filled with men and women he’d served with before joining SG-1 — from the cockpit of another F-302, and then mere weeks later had watched the Korolev suffer the same fate from much the same vantage, both times utterly powerless to do anything about it. Jonas had spent time aboard Prometheus, and the news had stung for him; he couldn’t begin to imagine how much worse it must have been for the Colonel. Even without his own people’s refusal to act when they so desperately needed to, how could Jonas ever say no to a man whose eyes conveyed all that?

So here he was: the Beta Site. Working alongside the Tau’ri, the Tok’ra, the Asgard, and anyone else that Stargate Command could find. But despite all of those minds, all of those perspectives, all of that knowledge, it all felt as if it rested upon his shoulders alone: because somewhere along the way, someone had decided that Naquadria was the solution. Jonas knew that people didn’t blame him that the X-302’s hyperdrive had never panned out. He knew that people didn’t blame him for the Prometheus becoming stranded on Tagrea. He knew that people didn’t blame him for the fact that, despite all of its potential, Naquadria had proven itself to not be particularly useful. No one blamed him for that.

Nobody except himself. He had made a choice all those years ago, to flee from his people and join Stargate Command. While he would like to think that his contributions to the Stargate Program and to SG-1 had more than proven his worth by now, Naquadria had been his gift to them, the peace offering that had helped sweeten his initial asylum. His reputation and relationship with his own people had been forever changed by that choice, and while he was not someone who felt that altering the past to rewrite the present was an effective or desirable proposition, it still would have been nice if some new discovery, some new practical application, could come along and retroactively make that choice seem just a little bit like it had all been worth it after all.

But the numbers were not numbering. The instability of the Naquadria persisted as an insurmountable complication. It didn’t help that the core idea — that using Naquadria to bolster a ship’s shields might turn its unpredictable exponential output into a benefit rather than a downside — hadn’t been his, but rather was the brainchild of one of Earth’s scientists. He felt like a fool for not seeing the possibility himself, no matter how repeatedly he reminded himself that good ideas were as much about opportunity and perspective as they were flashes of genius. You didn’t think of things that you weren’t thinking about, and as far as Jonas Quinn was concerned, Naquadria research had been shelved by scientists far more intelligent and experienced than he was.

In frustration, he let the pen he’d been holding fall from his fingers and clatter onto his workstation. The lighting was dim in this particular corner of the unnamed Battlecruiser that the Beta Site had under construction. Jonas told himself that he was helping to conserve power, no reason to place more drain on the ship’s batteries and auxiliary generators than was needed, but in truth he just enjoyed it this way. Cheyenne Mountain had been gloomy too, and while the walls and the doorways weren’t shaped correctly to fully sell the illusion, he found it comforting enough none the less, the almostness of the sense memories helping to draw his mind back to when these ideas and concepts had seemed fresh and new.

He glanced at his wrist, and cursed. He was supposed to have been at the Stargate, meeting a new group of arrivals from Earth. Some were from the IOA, members of Earth’s international community that apparently now had some increased sway over the Stargate Program than they’d had back when he’d fallen under what was now their purview, but more important was the team from Area 51. They’d requested reinforcements, of a sort: scientists from Stargate Command’s R&D efforts who had experience with generator research, and the Zero Point Modules that the Lost City of the Ancients used to power its shields — among other things. More expertise. More perspectives. More opportunities for someone to spot the puzzle piece that they were all missing.

He reached for his jacket, draped across one of the adjacent chairs, but hesitated as his mind turned to one of the other pending events that his mind had also forgotten to think about for a few peaceful distracted moments. A few weeks ago, Stargate Command had passed along word that the Ori had conquered Langara and Hebridan. What had been an ultimatum when he left — worship the Ori, or die — had now become an occupation, or worse. Jonas had heard what had happened on Tegalus, the weapon that the Rand Protectorate had been taught to construct to subjugate their foreign rivals, the very same weapon that had carved Prometheus in twain. It would be a lie to say that Jonas could not imagine what the nations of his world might do with that same power: he could vividly imagine such a thing, with alarming precision and fidelity, and it was only for the sake of his continued sanity that he forced himself not to. He’d witnessed tragic futures that he could do nothing to prevent before, the prospect of burdening himself with such things again held little appeal.

A few days ago, the Beta Site had sent a ship, a reconnaissance mission to Langara and Hebridan. A quest for information and insight, yes, but also a vain, bated-breath hope that some of the unaccounted for might be found and rescued from beneath the Ori’s grasp. Warrick Finn and the Sebrus were due back soon, assuming things had not once again fallen upon misfortune.

Jonas dared not hope that the shield modifications would be ready by then. The work was difficult enough without the pointed reminder that the fate of his homeworld very much hinged on their success.

Erin Gant halted as she reached the threshold of the Battlecruiser. It was not a hesitation, but a scheduled pause. Deliberate. Anticipated. A moment to collect herself before she entered this unnamed vessel that humanity had almost built. She halted because first impressions were important. General Ronson had not been subtle about his belief that Colonel Gant was ready for her own command, nor subtle about the fact that on a technicality the Pentagon and IOA were unlikely to concur. It made no difference in the current circumstances. Even if this particular Battlecruiser was unlikely to ever be hers, someday one would be. First impressions were important, and today she would make a good one.

“Not quite the same, is it?”

The voice belonged to Captain Jennifer Hailey, one of Area 51’s preeminent scientists. Colonel Samuels had been kind enough to recommend a few members of his staff whose help he suspected would be useful. When Colonel Carter had abandoned her role overseeing research and development at Area 51, Captain Hailey had stepped into her shoes, and the Captain’s reputation far eclipsed her diminutive stature. At Area 51, if someone referred to the “Mark 2”, they were just as likely to be referring to the Mark II Samantha Carter as they were the latest Naquadah Generator. Gant thought it a cruel comparison, but an inevitable one. What woman within the Stargate Program did not find herself shaded by the long shadow of Colonel Carter at some time or another?

“The 304 versus the 303, I mean.”

Captain Hailey continued to talk, filling the silence that Colonel Gant did not break herself. It was a correct observation: while there were some similarities between the Prometheus and her successors, the two were vastly different craft. Gant had heard the Prometheus and Daedalus referred to as “sister ships”, which she supposed was an easy mistake to make for someone who had no meaningful understanding of what that term meant. Gant preferred to think of the BC-304 as a cousin or a niece to the Battlecruiser upon which she had served: related, yes, but far enough removed to belong to a new family of its own.

“Indeed not,” Gant agreed, choosing not to correct the Captain’s mistaken belief that she was hesitating in thought. It was not only the ship where first impressions mattered, but with the people she was about to be working with as well. It would hardly help matters if she and Hailey began their working relationship with a correction over something that ultimately did not matter.

“Yeah, well —”

A different voice cut in this time: Lieutenant Laura Cadman. Gant had been surprised to find a member of the Marine Corps at Area 51, but apparently the Lieutenant had proven herself with the Atlantis Expedition, and had found her way to R&D when the Expedition was unceremoniously returned. Her voice was curt and impatient, but Gant chose not to infer anything from it: as best she could tell, the Marine was rather amiable under normal circumstances, but she had insisted on carrying some of their equipment from the Stargate to the construction site, and appeared to have reached the stage where she regretted that choice.

“— seen one Battlecruiser, seen them all, if you ask me,” she muttered, mostly to herself, as she silently but politely squeezed her way past the Colonel and Captain and into the ship beyond.

“After you, Lieutenant,” Hailey added, with a roll of her eyes. Silently, but with the faintest hint of a smile, Gant fell into step at the rear.

The interior of the Battlecruiser was strangely welcoming. Not because it seemed cosy, of course — quite the contrary, the corridors were as spartan and angular as ever — but rather because of the state of chaos they found it in. Access panels sat open. Optical conduits hung from the ceiling. Cases of circuit crystals littered the floors, waiting for some technician to complete the tedious task of installing them into the correct trays and in the correct configurations. While the external structure of the Battlecruiser was complete — construction completed, to the naive and untrained eye — her internals were far from ready. Colonel Gant didn’t need a status report to have a sense of just how many primary systems were likely to still be offline, and how many secondaries likely hadn’t even been unboxed, if the requisite components had even been delivered at all. To wax poetic: Frankenstein had stitched together his monster, but there was a long way to go before they were ready to flip the switch and give his creation life.

Or perhaps Greek mythology offered a more fitting comparison: Prometheus had finished shaping his creations from clay, but Athena had yet to breathe life into their lungs. She found comfort in that idea: that 304s such as this one were not copies of her Prometheus, but rather its greatest creation, and enduring legacy.

The engine room was not hard to find, the engines themselves rather conspicuous in their location when one viewed the ship from outside, and the engine room located conveniently and logically towards the same end of the ship. It was there that she had requested the other researchers meet with her, no time to waste on overzealous formalities or pleasantries. She forced herself to prepare on the move this time, no opportunity within these corridors to pause and do so, especially not with the equipment-laden Cadman setting the pace of their progress through the ship. The moment of distraction robbed her of peripheral attention, and she almost collided with another figure as they emerged from an adjoining corridor.

A moment of confusion and then recognition swept across the features of the other individual.

“Major Gant!”

The greeting was warmer than she would have predicted. Not a criticism of the man before her, merely a miscalculation of how favourably she expected to have been remembered. His eyes fell to the shoulders of the jumpsuit she wore, and the silver leaves embroidered on the drab green shoulders. Gant much preferred the blue that they had worn back in the Prometheus days, but the newer version had a greater abundance of pockets, and for that she was grateful.

“Colonel Gant, my apologies.” His features fell into a smile. “Congratulations?”

“Erin, if it makes things easier, Mr Quinn,” she countered, responding politely with just enough of a smile of her own.

“Then it’s Jonas,” he agreed, escalating their contest of facial expressions with an even warmer smile than before. It quickly tumbled into a wince of subtle awkwardness. “Sorry, I was just on my way to the Stargate to meet you.”

“Great!” Cadman’s voice interrupted, a vanguard of her approach as she backtracked her way down the corridor towards him. The clearly weighty storage case that she had been carrying settled onto the deck plates beside Jonas Quinn’s boots with a satisfying thunk. “Then I’m sure you would have felt compelled to volunteer to carry this.”

A tight flash of a smile was as much greeting or acknowledgement as Jonas was afforded before the Lieutenant retreated up the corridor. Captain Hailey was slightly less decisive in her opening gambit, seemingly of two minds before she eventually decided to set her case down at Jonas’ feet as well. “Captain Jennifer Hailey, nice to meet you,” she offered, not bothering to offer a hand to the man who clearly seemed too overwhelmed by what was happening to have realised the need to reciprocate. “And that was Lieutenant Cadman, I’m sure she’s pleased to meet you too.”

“Chair now, names later,” Cadman countered from up ahead, a note of fatigue tugging at her voice as she attempted to complete the final straight of her race to the engine room. Hailey shrugged, and wordlessly excused herself, leaving Jonas and Erin to simply stare in their wake.

“They’re here to help,” Colonel Gant offered, a hint of apology tugging at the corner of her mouth. “I promise.”

Claire Tobias shifted awkwardly as the Battlecruiser’s engine room filled up with yet more people who had much more of a right or reason to be here than she did. It wasn’t anything as pedestrian as imposter syndrome: she felt out of place for entirely practical and pragmatic reasons. That was what happened when you fell in with rogue elements of the NID, let them ship you off to another planet to dismantle and tinker with all the alien technology that they stole, and then got yourself arrested and thrown in a military stockade for your trouble. Everyone else was a veteran, an expert, distinguished in their field; she was just an ex-con, only here because everyone else was too law abiding and rules compliant to have enough experience duct taping together technologies that they probably shouldn’t have been touching in the first place.

She wasn’t ungrateful, though, far from it. Recognising that she didn’t belong in the room made her more appreciative of it, and more appreciative of the opportunity that had freed her from the stockade and given her the opportunity to actually do something. Not all of the officers the NID had recruited were so lucky. Not all of them were even still around to decide whether they’d come to regret their actions or not.

A subtle glance was thrown across the room to the man responsible for her comparative freedom: Alec Colson, the billionaire tech mogul who had pissed off The Trust so badly that Stargate Command had put him in witness protection on a whole new planet. It was his work at the Alpha Site, tinkering with F-302 schematics, and Replicator disruptors, and pretty much anything else that took his fancy and that he could get his hands on, that had been the first step in her being here at all. Colson had wanted assistance with his projects, everyone without a criminal record was too busy saving the world, and so Tobias had become the broken little toy that he’d taken it upon himself to try and fix.

While Tobias was grateful for the opportunity, she didn’t feel beholden to him for it. Others might have, but she understood the situation: Colson had a use for her, and so she was gifted the opportunity to be — and to feel — useful. Continue to be useful, and the military stockade transformed into house arrest. Stop being useful, and she had no doubts that she’d be back where she started.

Colson seemed to notice her attention, and shot her a stealthy paternal wink. She hated that she didn’t hate that. Tobias had no interest in being anyone’s surrogate, but there was something about the billionaire’s inflated persona that was both infuriating and disarming at the same time.

“— so basically,” Doctor Lindsey Novak continued, with so much awkwardness buried beneath her words that it almost leeched Tobias’ own discomfort out of her body through some kind of weird social anxiety reverse osmosis, “Our technology just lacks the computing power to stay ahead of the Naquadria’s instability. By the time our systems register there being an issue, it’s already too late, and at that point it’s like trying to catch a Jenga tower that is already falling: you’re more likely to make things worse by trying.”

She faltered, shooting a glance in the direction of one of the Asgard — Hermiod, Tobias figured, based on where they’d been standing when they were introduced, but honestly she could barely tell them apart; they even sounded the same — apparently seeking some kind of reassurance or approval. “Does that about cover it?”

The Asgard blinked, slowly. Tobias found herself quietly impressed by how much emotion the stoic Roswell Grey managed to convey with so few facial muscles. “A sufficient summation,” he agreed; Doctor Novak seemed visibly relieved.

“What we tried on the Prometheus,” Colonel Gant explained, “Was a buffer system. Rather than try to draw power from the Naquadria directly, we siphoned power gradually, over time. Smaller increments, smaller chance of instability, and less severity when fluctuations occur.“

“Unfortunately —” Jonas Quinn chimed in, catching the proverbial ball and running with it. He too looked uncomfortable — which was understandable, what with all of the planet occupied by the Ori trauma that he was so obviously trying to bury and ignore, but this seemed different somehow. Guilt, perhaps? Not survivor’s guilt, more the kind of guilt when you felt you’d let somebody down. Probably because he’d decided he was solely responsible for every issue and complication that occurred with Naquadia until the end of time, that seemed like a very guy thing to do in this sort of situation.

“— the Prometheus encountered a gravitational wave in subspace during our first test flight. A fluke accident that demanded more power to maintain a stable field than the buffer could provide, and burned out the components in the process. Fixable, but also unpredictable, and by the time we managed to recover the Prometheus from Tagrea and return her to Earth, our friends the Asgard —” He gestured in the direction of Hermiod and Kvasir, or perhaps Kvasir and Hermiod, whichever way round it was. “— had decided to express their gratitude for our help against the Replicators by providing us with the hyperdrive technology that we use today.”

“But the premise is still sound,” Colson contributed next. “Or at least it should be.”

“The Ancients used a similar approach to powering the orbital weapons satellites that used to defend Atlantis,” Cadman agreed. “A little too slow to recharge to have been practical in a firefight, as we learned the hard way, but we don’t need a capacitor that recharges instantly, just one that recharges faster than the Ori beam weapons do.”

“Exactly! Which is the approach that our efforts have taken thus far. Using the schematics of those weapons platforms that your Expedition recovered from the Pegasus Galaxy —” He threw an appreciative nod towards Cadman. “— and Captain Hailey’s incredibly thorough analysis of the capacitor device that Colonel O’Neill constructed while he was under the influence of the Ancient Repository —”

“General O’Neill,” several officers corrected, in unison.

“— and used to establish an intergalactic wormhole to our friends, the Asgard,” Colson pushed on, unphased by both the interruption and the correction, “We have constructed a capacitance buffer that we believe will vastly improve the survivability of our Battlecruisers against the Ori’s energy weapons.” He allowed himself a small chuckle; another mannerism for Tobias to be annoyed by. “We were already most of the way there, before we even started: gravity waves and subspace fields aren’t something we need to be worried about if we aren’t trying to power a hyperdrive.”

A silence fell, waiting for someone to vocalise what they all knew. Colonel Gant took that bullet.

“But it doesn’t work.”

A sigh escaped from Colson. “But it doesn’t work.”

A slightly different kind of silence settled into place, the contemplative kind, the kind where you knew everyone was thinking and no one wanted to speak up first, because the first suggestion was always the dumb suggestion. Tobias felt no need to shy away from that. After all, she was already a pariah thanks to her past, how much worse could things get?

“Devil’s advocate here,” she began slowly, “But it sorta sounds to me like a lot of our problems would be solved if the Asgard would just pony up and help us out with some better power generation.” She shifted her stance slightly, bringing both of the aliens into her gaze, and took a 50/50 stab in the dark at which of the two was the individual she intended to focus on. “You were at P3Y-229, right? Your ship made it out of there in a lot fewer pieces than the Korolev did, and if it’s true that's the only thing holding our technology back, then —”

Colson tried to cut in, attempting to handle her like she was an out of line executive at a board of directors meeting, or whatever it was that he’d done in his former life. “I think it’s a little bit more complicated than that,” he offered, trying to give the Asgard an easy out; but one of them held up a hand to forestall any continuation.

“The Lieutenant is correct,” the Asgard that Tobias had guessed was Kvasir countered. Now that she actually listened to him, she supposed there was a little bit of a difference between the two: more of a lilt to his words, more energy, more enthusiasm. “As you have learned first hand from your occasional access to Lantean Zero Point Modules, the defensive and propulsion technologies that we have provided will indeed scale as your power generation abilities increase. It is our belief that power generation is one of the most easily quantifiable metrics to measure a civilization’s advancement, and your planet’s slow but inevitable advancement towards more environmentally conscientious forms of energy will —”

“— will not occur quickly enough to be relevant to this conflict,” Hermiod interrupted. His eyes narrowed slightly in Kvasir’s direction. “Or indeed to this conversation.”

Something unspoken passed between the two of them. Maybe everyone else picked up on it too, or maybe Tobias had just spent enough time around people keeping secrets by necessity that she just had a feel for that sort of thing. Either way, it wasn’t either of the Asgard who spoke up next, but rather the last thus-far silent member of their ensemble.

“Ultimately,” the deep baritone of Jalen — or perhaps Jalen’s symbiote; Tobias hadn’t figured out whether the name belonged to the host or the Tok’ra, and at this point it almost felt rude to ask — rang out, draping itself across the flickerings of inter-Asgard tension like a warm blanket, “The decision to provide this alliance with yet more technology lies with the Asgard High Council, and not with Commanders Hermiod and Kvasir. If such a decision is reached, then our efforts here will be rendered unnecessary, but our objectives will have been achieved and our galaxy will be — one would hope — safer.” She took a step forward, her hands clasping behind her back, subtly signalling the outcome that she suspected. “Should they not, however, then countless lives on countless worlds will be relying on us to overcome this challenge without them.”

There was something that Tobias might almost has described as sass in the Tok’ra’s words, and yet the symbiote’s depth of voice somehow smoothed and obscured those rough edges into something that nearly sounded respectful. Tobias would have to ask to be taught how to do that, it seemed like a skill she would find a considerable amount of use for.

“I guess it’s a good thing then,” Hailey announced, with a hint of triumph in her voice, “That I come bearing gifts.”

The first of the two secure containers that Jonas Quinn had struggled in with was lifted upwards by the shoulder high Captain, and settled onto a convenient surface. She took a moment to ensure that the case was orientated correctly — smart, Tobias had experienced that particular embarrassing mistake first-hand — before flicking open the clasps, and carefully lifting open the lid. “This,” she explained, almost reverent in her care as she lifted the crystalline construct from within the moulded protective foam, “Is one of the original, depleted ZPMs that the Atlantis Expedition sent back on one of the first Daedalus missions. We have no idea how they’re made, and we’re pretty sure there’s no way to recharge them, but they are designed to safely conduct absurd amounts of energy, and we’re hoping that we can either makeshift or reverse engineer something that might help. And then this —”

There was a little more pride in the Captain’s voice as she turned her attention to the second container, leaving it on the ground this time, and lifting just the clearly weighty contents up onto her rapidly growing display. Made sense, Tobias supposed: she had helped design the thing after all.

“— is one of our Mark II Naquadah Generators. We designed these to try and spoof the Ancient chair weapon in Antarctica into thinking it was connected to a ZPM. The Marines that gated through to Atlantis during the Wraith attack brought one with them, and it seemed to work — once, at least.”

“It has nowhere near the same potential as a fully fledged Naquadria generator, obviously,“ Captain Hailey mused, her face scrunching up in thought, “But I was wondering if maybe power generation in parallel might be part of the solution here? Instead of trying to rush the recharge on our shield capacitor and risk drawing enough to get the Naquadria all riled up, maybe we try pulling power from multiple sources at once.”

“Huh.” Jonas Quinn shifted his posture, arms folding and brow furrowing as he adjusted the way he leant against the convenient console corner that he’d selected for himself. “Like trying to fill up a bucket while it’s already raining.”

If Hailey was as thrown off by the strange simile as Tobias was, she didn’t show it. “Exactly. Even if all the Mark II does is make sure the bucket is never completely empty, if it just gives us the extra percent of a percent that we need to stop the Naquadria going over the edge —”

Her confidence wavered, collapsing into a shrug. “It’s the best that I’ve got right now.”

The damned paternal smile found its way onto Colson’s features again. “And it’s the best that we’ve had so far,” he assured, a double thumbs up and a PB3-865’s Best Dad mug away from completing the cringeworthy ensemble. The worst part was the way it actually seemed to affect Captain Hailey in a positive way.

“It would seem that we have a new hypothesis to test, then.” After remaining silent and letting the scientists and engineers play volleyball with their thoughts, Colonel Gant took command of the conversation once more. Her eyes scanned the room, taking them all in one by one. “Let’s get to work.”

Chapter Text

Major Voronkova stood awkwardly at the periphery of the Battlecruiser bridge. She had followed Colonel Gant and her companions from a respectful distance on their approach to the landed — or rather, never yet airborne — ship, and upon her arrival had made her way directly here. She had told herself that she was giving the scientists and engineers space to focus on their work, without the distracting presence of a Russian in the room — such things often put Americans on edge — but in truth, she had merely wanted to be alone.

Part of her felt the experience would have been better that way. No less painful, of course, but at least private. With the bridge of this surrogate Battlecruiser empty, her mind could add in the ghosts of those who had died aboard the Korolev. She had known them all; vetted and approved most of them. They would not have been here — there — were it not for her approval. They would not have died were it not for her.

But the experience had become more profound when people had arrived. Apparently Colonel Gant and her team had their plan, and so preparations needed to be made, subroutines rewritten, systems recalibrated. The bridge had undergone a metamorphosis, the tomb she had imagined herself in suddenly transforming into a hive of activity. She found herself on the outside, watching as things she didn’t understand and could not influence transpired around her. Redundant. Useless. Powerless. Just as she would have been on the Korolev. Just as she would have been on any of the other missions that had cost the lives of Russian servicemen that she knew.

No one had questioned her, or challenged her presence. A few stray glances, perhaps, but everyone knew the Russians had been coming, and lurking uninvited and ineffective in the corners had become their status quo of late. For a moment, she let herself wonder how differently things might have unfolded had the Odyssey been destroyed and the Korolev had survived. Presumably, construction of this Battlecruiser and her sister at Earth would have proceeded at a more frantic pace. Would the Americans have abandoned the Pegasus Galaxy in order to keep the Daedalus here in the Milky Way, or would they have grudgingly trusted Colonel Chekov and the Korolev as true allies in the fight against the Ori? What would her own people have done, if the Stargate had suddenly ceased to be their only avenue to the stars? There had been whispers of a Russian offworld base, not unlike the one rogue elements of the NID had established years ago: a way to circumvent the SGC and its western approach to dealing with things. Part of Voronkova yearned for the freedom that promised; the rest of her recalled how badly things had gone the last time Russia had run its own Stargate Program. Perhaps it was for the best that they were not able to repeat such missteps. Frequent as the Americans’ mistakes were, at least they seemed to slowly learn from them.

“You’re welcome to take a seat.”

The voice startled her, wrenching Voronkova from her wandering thoughts and back into the present. She wondered if she had simply been too distracted, or if Colonel Gant was more stealthy than Voronkova would have guessed. A faint ghost of a smile, part embarrassed, part grateful, tugged at the corner of Voronkova’s mouth.

“Niet. No, thank you. I am —” Daria stumbled over her words. “It is best I keep out of the way.”

Gant took a moment to acknowledge and respect that sentiment, before gently dismissing it entirely. “The worst feeling in the world,” she quietly explained, yet it was softer than that, closer to commiseration, “Is living with the knowledge that there was nothing you could have done.”

It took a heartbeat for Daria to understand. Prometheus. Of course. If anyone might have been able to relate to what she was feeling, it was her: someone else who had suffered the loss of a ship full of comrades, spared because her duties had required her elsewhere. Under other circumstances, this might have been a time for commiseration — there was surely vodka here on the Beta Site somewhere — but the moment was too busy, and the bridge too crowded for such sentimentality.

“I fly desks, not starships,” Daria offered, with enough of a smile to make it seem as if none of this mattered. Her dark eyes betrayed her, a spark of vulnerability dislodging their usual determination. “You will find me of little use aboard a Battlecruiser such as this.”

Erin’s steel gaze was having none of it. “Can you work a radio?”

“Da, but —”

Somehow, Erin barely moved and yet managed to gesture to one of the stations across the bridge from their quiet corner. “Forward station, left side. Our shield tests are going to require air support, and I am going to need someone to help coordinate with the boys at Beta.”

Something twisted in Daria’s gut, recoiling beneath what to her felt like an act of pity. “I appreciate the gesture, but —”

“Until Stargate Command tells me otherwise,” Erin cut her off, sternly, “I am in command here, and Russian or not, I know for a fact there aren’t enough little stars on your uniform to challenge that.” She paused for a moment, just enough to let the weight of that sentiment settle, before a hint of her earlier softness crept back in. “No one on my ship gets to feel useless, is that understood, Major?”

Voronkova straightened her posture, and tried — and failed — to hide the quiet appreciation from her face. “Da, Colonel,” she replied with a curt nod. “Understood.”

Cadman wasn’t entirely sure why she was here, and truth be told the whole situation had her feeling a little out of place. Her journey through the Stargate Program had begun as part of the Marine detail on Atlantis, but along the way she’d got herself tangled up with Rodney McKay and Carson Beckett, and before they knew it they had her wearing one of those dark grey jackets with the little blue parts instead of the little black parts, and suddenly she was being treated like she was one of the nerds instead of one of the soldiers. It had its perks, particularly if you were the sort of person who enjoyed getting to know what was going on most of the time, but the monkey’s paw consequence was that when they’d all been evicted from Pegasus and had shown up at their parents’ house carrying as much of their stuff as they could carry, she’d been packed off to Area 51 with the science brigade instead of getting a proper assignment with the rest of the Marines.

She hadn’t even been able to enjoy the cool factor of being at Area Fifty-freaking-One, because that was where Rodney McKay also was, and as insufferable as he had been back on Atlantis, him being involuntarily not on Atlantis made things even worse.

That was the silver lining then, of her tagging along on this little weekend away on the Beta Site: no matter how awkward and out of place she felt, she’d never be upset about being wherever Rodney McKay wasn’t.

Of course, it was also probably because of Rodney McKay that she was even here at all. Cadman had the horrifying suspicion that McKay might have recommended her for this, not as a means to get rid of her, but as a complimentary reflection on her skills. That was its own special kind of alarming. At least with McKay as an adversary, there was some fun to be had by messing with him. But Cadman had seen the way McKay was with his friends, and Cadman couldn’t think of anything she wanted first hand experience of less.

In this exact moment though, twisted up at an awkward angle underneath one of the Battlecruiser’s consoles, reaching into the mess of crystals and circuitry that really should have been placed somewhere much more accessible, she felt much more at home. It wasn’t just the wires and crystal circuits, it wasn’t just the satisfying task of running bypasses and deciphering pathways. It was manual. Physical. No math, no physics, no mind-bending theoretical science that existed only as thoughts and words. This was a real thing, with a real solution, something inherently tangible. This was light fixtures, and spark plugs, fixing the truck with her dad or a broken blender for her mom. Problem, solution, solved.

If only more of the Stargate Program’s problems had solutions this simple.

Even the company was preferable to Area 51, at least for Cadman. She had been warned about the former Lieutenant, formerly of the NID, convicted of treason for her seditious acts as part of a rogue offworld operation. She’d expected some unrepentant hardass, scars and a shaved head, Neo Nazi tattoos across every inch of her uncomfortably muscular body. But Lieutenant Tobias was just a person, just an engineer, a glorified mechanic the same as she was. She had made bad choices, and her current situation was the consequence of those choices. But at the time, she’d thought she was doing the right thing. She’d gone along with it, because a Colonel employed by the United States government had told her she was helping to save the world. Was that treason, or was that just black ops? It was easy to sit back and say that Tobias should have known better, but was their technology at all costs mission statement that much different from the kinds of off-the-books missions that special forces or the CIA did on America’s behalf all the time? Was it really that different from some of the morally dubious things that the Atlantis Expedition had got up to, particularly during that out-of-contact first year?

Sure, the key difference was that one had Presidential sign-off and the other didn’t, but the more Cadman tried to put herself in Tobias’ shoes, the less confidence she had that she’d have been able to tell the difference. That in itself was alarming, but more than anything else, the word that resonated most with Cadman was unfair.

“You’re enjoying this too much,” Tobias commented, from an almost but not quite uncomfortably close position off to her left. Cadman shifted just enough to throw a questioning glance in her direction. “You’re smiling at the circuits,” Tobias clarified, with an expression that Cadman found completely unfathomable from this angle. “It’s weird.”

Cadman tried to shrug, but the way her shoulder was wedged against the support strut of the console thwarted her efforts. “I miss my car,” she lied, although it wasn’t an untrue statement. “Had to leave her with my parents back in Michigan when I shipped off to Atlantis, and I haven’t had much chance to work on her since I got back.”

“Oh, you were on Atlantis?”

Tobias asked it as if it was a matter of casual curiosity, but Cadman immediately felt a twist of guilt in her gut at having acted like it was common knowledge. She did her best to downplay her response, keeping her role as small and insignificant as she could manage. “Yeah. Not part of the initial Expedition, but I was with the Marine detail they sent out once they got the Daedalus working. Hence, y’know.” She gestured to the console above them, into which they had carefully installed a replica of the same ZPM mounting that had been used to power the Stargate when the Atlantis Expedition first left, and that the Daedalus had used to integrate the power source into its own systems, for a few days at least. “Them thinking I know what I’m doing with this thing.”

“Ah.” While it could have been a reaction to the latter part of Cadman’s explanation, the way that Tobias’ voice hung in the air made it seem like there was more to it than that. “That would explain it.”

It was Cadman’s turn to pull a strange facial expression. “Explain what?”

Tobias didn’t answer immediately, instead spending a few seconds sliding her own circuit tray back into place into the console above them. Her much slimmer, longer frame had an easier time shrugging than Cadman’s had. “I could tell you were a different kind of asshole to all these other clowns, but I hadn’t quite pegged you as a Marine.”

Without another word, Tobias slid herself out from under the console, leaving Cadman staring up at her own circuits, slowly processing the burn she might have just received. From the corner of her vision, Tobias’ boots and ankles retreated across the Battlecruiser engine room, towards the station where Hermiod was busy grumbling away to hide the fact that he secretly enjoyed all the complicated mathematics that humanity kept asking him to do. But the words lingered, Cadman couldn’t stop herself from calling after Tobias.

“Should I be flattered or insulted right now?”

Lieutenant Fischer seldom felt comfortable anywhere these days, but the cockpit of an F-302 was the closest he got. While he had never been assigned to the fighter wing aboard Prometheus, Daedalus, or Odyssey, nor any of the Earth-based squadrons that Stargate Command and a few of their allies had discreetly hidden in various remote strategic locations around the world, like many of the Air Force officers who found their way to the SGC, Fischer’s career had begun in the cockpit, and it had become almost standard practice for any flight-qualified members of SG teams to get the opportunity to fly a few practice scenarios in an F-302, a Death Glider, and whatever else Area 51 might happen to have had lying around at the time. Officially, it was a matter of prudence, Stargate Command having long ago lost count of the number of times a handy Death Glider escape had saved the lives of its teams. Unofficially, the winged SGC recruits liked to think of it as just being a perk.

For Fischer, it was more than that. Flying had always felt like freedom to him, and the space-capable F-302 was the ultimate expression of that, immune even to the effects of inertia depending on how well the dampeners were calibrated, not just the effects of gravity. But now more than ever, Fischer felt the relief of leaving the ground and his troubles behind. Ever since his last mission with SG-6, ever since one of the Priors had turned him into a Trojan Horse for a plague that had killed thousands, he’d felt uncomfortable whenever people were around. He’d been given a clean bill of health, but that didn’t change anything for him. It didn’t dislodge the guilt of being the reason his team were dead and gone, no matter how many people insisted that it wasn’t his fault.

Being in the air, being as far away from people he might harm as he could possibly get? He awaited that anxiously, as the F-302 idled and lingered on the Beta Site’s tarmac runway. It was the only time it felt like everyone else was safe.

Except for his copilot, of course, whose voice crackled through the intercom in Fischer’s helmet.

“Are you sure about this, Battlecruiser? These warheads you have us carrying aren’t exactly designed to be gentle.”

Fischer could almost hear the facial expression that went along with the Russian Major’s stern response. “I am relaying Colonel Gant’s instructions correctly, Captain Grogan.”

A face usually reserved for witnessing unfortunately brutal football tackles formed on Fischer’s face, but he managed to keep his voice mostly silent, save for a brief wince of sympathetic pain on Grogan’s behalf.

“Copy that, Battlecruiser,” Grogan replied, somehow managing to sound as if he was completely unphased. Perhaps he was, too: the Captain had a reputation for getting stunned, shot, tased, and zatted at just about any opportunity, surely by this point he must have developed a pretty impressive pain threshold. Or maybe it was just a kink thing, some guys were into that, and if they were it was none of Fischer’s business. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

“Beta, this is Bravo Three, we have a green light from the Battlecruiser and are requesting a go for launch.”

A new voice joined the conversation, Sergeant Birkel, if Fischer remembered right. There were a handful of non-coms working the control room at the Beta Site, and PB3-865’s thirty-five hour — ish — days made it hard to keep track of who was meant to be on shift at which time.

“Copy, Bravo Three. Airspace is clear, and Tridents are in position. We are green for weapons free on your command. Beta Actual has requested I say godspeed and good hunting. Bravo Two, Bravo Three, you are go for launch.”

Fischer couldn’t help feel something at the notion of Ferretti insisting on quoting General Hammond in a moment like this. Fischer might almost have found it comforting, were it not for the persistent memory of Secret Service agents hustling the General into a car while hazmat suits swarmed around Fischer himself. Hammond had come to see him, afterwards, because of course he had. If memory serves, we were about to shake hands before we were so rudely interrupted. Trust General George Hammond to take it upon himself to be the one to offer Fischer reassurance, to set aside all his vastly more important duties to try and dislodge the guilt from his shoulders. It would have worked, too, should have worked. If anyone stood a chance of getting through to Fischer in that moment, it would have been General Hammond. But his mind twisted it, reminded him that he’d been mere moments away from adding someone for whom he held so much respect to his list of inadvertent victims. It wasn’t your fault, son.

He hated that those words felt like a lie.

But the order had been given, and safety awaited. A quick glance to his left, a quick thumbs up to Lieutenant Anders across the way in Bravo Two, a quick confirmation from Captain Grogan behind him, and they were off, surging forward and then upward in record time, hurled back into their seats by the impossible acceleration that, were it not for the thankfully functioning inertial dampers, would surely have compressed them into paste.

It took seconds to reach flight altitude, the 302 effortlessly struggling off the wisps of cloud and vapour that tried to clutch at the cockpit canopy and wings, only a few seconds more to leave the Beta Site behind them, and trace a wide arc around the foothills to the wide open flat where Earth’s next Battlecruiser lay resting. Under other circumstances, the trio of Death Gliders hovering ominously off the cruiser’s forward quarter might have been cause for concern, but today they were here to help, in the most stereotypically Jaffa way possible.

“Trident Flight, this is Bravo Three,” Grogan announced over their mission comms. “Commence firing at your target coordinates.”

“With pleasure,” replied the voice of Shaq’rel, who genuinely did seem a little too pleased about the prospect of being given permission to do his best to put a dent in Earth’s new-ish and shiny-ish toy. Fischer supposed he couldn’t blame the guy: Shaq’rel spent most of his time in a Tel’tak; the appeal of getting to screech around in a Death Glider and shoot at things was an easy one to relate to.

A few words of Goa’uld that Fischer couldn’t quite catch followed, and then the Death Gliders did as instructed, golden globs of super-hot plasma hurling themselves from beneath their crescent wings towards the slumbering Battlecruiser. Fischer wasn’t sure what to fixate on more: the frankly impressive precision with which the three craft managed to concentrate their fire exactly as instructed, hanging in the air more like helicopters than jet fighters, carefully twisting and adjusting as the recoil from their oversized staff cannons tried to buffet them out of position; or the fact that somewhere along the way of putting together this test of the 304’s shield upgrades, someone had decided to ask the Jaffa to fire directly at the bridge. Maybe there was some logic to it, maybe it just made sense to test the ship’s defenses by shooting at somewhere an enemy was fairly likely to target, but Fischer couldn’t begin to imagine how ominous and intimidating the view must have been from the bridge, watching those three Death Gliders looming at you, and trusting that thin air would somehow catch their onslaught.

But catch it thin air did, rippling and shimmering as the forward arc of the 304’s Asgard-designed shields dissipated the energy outwards. Fischer released a breath he didn’t realise he was holding, but this was just the start. Everyone knew that the shields on a Battlecruiser could hold up against Death Gliders. They could even hold up against Goa’uld Motherships, even the fancy Anubis ones. The Ori, though? That was a whole other ball of wax.

“Polaris, you are clear for your run.”

Spiralling down from above with far more flash and finesse than was necessary under the circumstances, a Free Jaffa Al’kesh screamed into view, cannon turret blazing as it carved a strafing run across the Battlecruiser, burning plasma charges tumbling like stars as they dropped from the bomber’s ventral launchers and splashed against the shields below.

Fischer steered the F-302 into a wide loop, arcing around the Battlecruiser, surveying the damage. “Everything still looks in one piece so far,” he commented, trying to peer past the fighter’s superstructure for a better view on the hulking shape below.

“What’s your status, Battlecruiser?” Apparently Grogan had chosen to rely on his ears rather than his eyes. “We’re seeing a lot of fireworks above you, but not from you. Hopefully that is a good sign.”

“Da, Captain. We are still quite intact. You may proceed to Phase Two.”

Grogan let out a sigh. One of Grogan’s more noticeable traits was his fondness for banter: not quite a vice, but not exactly a virtue either. Apparently, Major Voronkova was not feeling particularly compatible with that today, and Fischer couldn’t help but enjoy the projected discomfort that he assumed the Captain must have been feeling.

“You heard the lady, Fish,” Grogan offered with a shrug. “Bravo Three to Bravo Two, we are cleared hot for Phase Two. Transmitting final target coordinates now.”

“Copy, Bravo Three,” Lieutenant Anders replied over the radio, “Coordinates received; we are on your lead.”

Colonel Gant gripped the arms of the commander’s chair. Her source of seating was a reluctant choice. It felt disrespectful, somehow. Not her chair — at least, not officially. But practicality had won out over her personal feelings. The design of a bridge was not a purely aesthetic thing: the commander’s chair was where it was for a reason, and as preparations for the shield test had escalated, she’d had no logical choice but to take a seat.

Her grasp was an involuntary flinch, forced upon her by the four payloads that the Beta Site’s two 302’s had just delivered into their shields. One of the downsides to their shield enhancements was how difficult it was to actually test. A system designed to augment their defenses when they were being overtaxed could only be tested by actively overtaxing those shields. The output of those fighter-launched missiles had been designed so that, combined, their output matched the onslaught the Odyssey had previously endured while toe-to-toe with three of Ba’al’s Ha’tak a few months earlier.

“That made a dent,” Captain Hailey announced from the station to her right. It felt strange having her there: aboard Prometheus the station to Ronson’s right had been hers, but the 304 had reversed things, and so Hailey quite rightly sat in the Navigator’s chair, not at the helm. The disorientation left Gant feeling slightly unbalanced, however.

The sight, and sound, and feel of Death Gliders and Al’kesh attacking the ship reminding her of the Battle of Antarctica didn’t help much, either.

“That last salvo was enough to start drawing on our shield buffer, but for now we’re still within the output range of the Naquadah generator, no increased draw on our Naquadria generation as yet.”

An unfortunate mix of good news and bad. Good, because their theory was working. Bad, because they had yet to subject their efforts to the kind of strain that might cause things to go wrong. Based on their simulations, the shield modifications would perform as intended as long as the buffer remained at least partially charged. It was when the buffer was drained faster than the Mark II Naquadah Generator could keep up with that the power draw from the Naquadria reactor would spike, and due to the inherent unpredictability of the complex isotope, there was little certainty that simulations could offer.

They had no choice then but to strain their shields further still.

Gant’s eyes met with Voronkova’s, already looking back towards her, awaiting the inevitable instruction. “Proceed to Phase Three.”

Sometimes you didn’t realise you were holding your breath. Other times you did: like now, as the lack of air tightened like a vice around his lungs, waiting for the Battlecruiser’s latest instructions to be obeyed. He watched, breathlessly, as the layer of clouds above them bubbled and broiled, brushed aside by the sleek descending shape of the Asgard Mothership that Kvasir had parked in orbit when he and Hermiod first arrived.

Azure rain cascaded from the Carter’s prow, each orb of violent blue larger than the 302 that held Grogan and Fischer aloft. The fighter banked hard as Fischer steered them towards a safer distance, and despite the pressurised hull of the cockpit that separated Grogan from the air outside, he could swear he felt the radiant energy crackling against his skin.

It was a rare and terrifying sight, even in simulated circumstances like this. Grogan wondered how many hands he would need to count the number of people who’d witnessed the power of the Asgard like this; not many, that was for sure.

No wonder his ancestors had figured them for gods.

So enraptured by the sight was Grogan that he barely noticed the sudden shift in the readouts on the console display in front of him. It was Fischer who drew his attention to it.

“Uh-oh. That’s not good.”

“Asgard vessel, hold your fire! Repeat, hold your fire!”

Voronkova’s earnest voice rang across the bridge, even with all the noise and chaos that seemed to hang in the air just as much as the smoke and the scent of ozone did. Conduits embedded in the ceiling continued to spit small plumes of sparks; no amount of surge protectors could compensate for the inevitable overloads that came from energy weapons discharges bleeding through the shields and dissipating through the hull.

Instantly, the vibrating of the deck plates ceased, and the ambient cacophony of the Battlecruiser subsided back to more tolerable levels. For a brief moment, Gant’s eyes met with Voronkova’s: the Major hadn’t waited to be ordered to call off the Asgard ship’s attack, and while under other circumstances that might have been a problem, in this instance her quick thinking had likely saved them from a lot of damage and dollars. She offered a curt nod, and received one in reply.

In front of her, the air shimmered, and in a blink Kvasir appeared, rippling and translucent as Asgard holograms were wont to do. A gentle electrical hum filled the background of her senses; Gant had never been sure why the Asgard technology made that sound, but as no one else ever seemed to comment on it, she had chosen never to do so either.

“Colonel Gant.”

The Asgard sounded as chipper as ever, but there was a note of concern in his voice.

“I trust that your crew and vessel remain intact?”

Gant glanced in Hailey’s direction. “The paintwork up top is probably a little scorched,” the Captain explained, “But nothing that won’t buff out. No casualties reported, either.”

The Colonel leaned in her chair, peering past the hologram towards Voronkova. “Please relay that to Captain Grogan, and have him pass it along to the Beta Site. I’m sure we have some concerned pilots out there.”

Kvasir shuffled awkwardly, clearly relieved by the status report, but not entirely satisfied with the situation at large. “My weapons discharges were calibrated exactly as discussed,” he offered, almost defensively, almost as if he was trying to convince himself that he was in no way culpable for the test’s failure. “I am unsure what went wrong —”

“It wasn’t you, Kvasir,” Hailey cut him off with a sigh, punching away at the controls on her station, reading over the various readouts and sensor data. She glanced up at Colonel Gant, who silently offered permission to continue speaking. “You simulated the impact of an Ori beam weapon exactly as we wanted. Our buffer system worked exactly as we expected it to. What we didn’t factor in was the bleedthrough effect of a discharge like that. With the way our shields work —” She hesitated for a moment, wondering if further explanation was even necessary in light of that premise, but pressed on regardless, choosing to say it for the sake of saying it. “— they can’t quite block everything. They aren’t perfect. They let light through, obviously, but there’s also some amount of heat and other forms of energy that leak through. That’s one of the reasons we project the shields so far from the ship itself: by the time that bleedthrough actually reaches the ship itself, it’s had more time to dissipate, more time to become less harmful.”

Hailey slumped a little in her chair, a wave of defeat washing over her. “The problem is, the weaker our shields get, the less effective they are. Eighty percent shields doesn’t mean everything’s fine and we’ve got eighty percent to go: it means they’re eighty percent effective. Twenty percent less good than when they’re at full power. Twenty percent more opportunity for that unwanted excess to bleed through.”

Her arms folded, and she shrugged. “Our buffer system worked, but it put a bottleneck on things. We were able to maintain our shields, but not at a high enough power level to block enough of the weapon’s discharge. In theory, we can soak up all of the energy that an Ori beam weapon might throw at us, we just can’t soak it up fast enough to stop at least some of it from making it through to the ship. It’s like a bulletproof vest: it’ll catch the bullet, but it’s still gonna feel like getting punched in the chest, hard.”

Colonel Gant pinched the bridge of her nose. Things were not going well. Her ambitions for a good first impression were rapidly slipping. Kvasir didn’t seem to have much optimism to offer, either.

“I believe this would be an appropriate moment for one of your colourful Earth profanities,” he suggested, with a tone that almost made it seem like he thought it was a useful contribution.

“Пиздец,” Major Voronkova obliged.