Chapter Text
DISCLAIMER:
The characters mentioned in this story are the property of Showtime and Gekko Film Corp. The Stargate, SG-I, the Goa'uld and all other characters who have appeared in the series STARGATE SG-1 together with the names, titles and backstory are the sole copyright property of MGM-UA Worldwide Television, Gekko Film Corp, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions and Stargate SG-I Prod. Ltd. Partnership. This fanfic is not intended as an infringement upon those rights and solely meant for entertainment. All other characters, the story idea and the story itself are the sole property of the author.
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Brigadier General George Hammond, retired, stood beside his wife's grave. He wouldn't have given up the chance to spend this last year with Ellie for anything, but now that she was finally gone, he felt adrift, at a loss what to do with himself. His daughter Deborah stood beside him, wiping the tears from her eyes. "I miss her already, Dad," she whispered.
"I know," George said. He turned to look at his elder daughter, talking politely to some of the people who had come to the burial, and his two grandchildren standing unnaturally quietly beside her, bewildered and oppressed by the sad occasion.
It seemed to go on for days, but really it was only three before Debbie had gone back to her job in St. Louis and he had convinced Liz she didn't need to hover over him. Without the extra people, the house seemed enormous. George Hammond looked out over the sunny yard to the flowers that Ellie had loved and realized that he couldn't do nothing. He'd toyed with the idea of writing a book, but honestly couldn't see that yet another set of dry reminiscences by an old soldier would hold much interest for anyone. The Air Force was the only thing he'd ever done, the only thing he'd ever wanted to do and it had treated him well. He might even have retired with a second star if it hadn't been for Ellie's illness.
Almost without thinking, he turned to the antique rolltop desk and the functional rolladex it concealed. There was a stack of cards and letters of condolence waiting for him to answer them. The top one was from an old buddy from Nam, Jake Carter. He briefly stopped to calculate how many years it had been since he'd seen Jake, but winced and resumed flipping cards. Too long. The organized habits of a lifetime let him quickly find the number he wanted. "Hello, may I speak to General Ryan?"
#
"Mike, good to see you," George said, shaking Ryan's hand.
"And you, George," Ryan replied cordially. "I'm very sorry to hear about Ellie-"
"We knew it wouldn't be long-" George said.
"I still wish you'd taken leave instead of retiring," Ryan chided gently.
"I didn't want there to be a time limit on my attention," George said quietly. "But I'll admit I'm somewhat at a loss what to do with myself right now."
"Ah, yes," Ryan gave him a shrewd look, which sat oddly on his round cheerful features. "Actually, if you're interested in coming out of retirement, I might have a little job for you."
Hammond supposed he shouldn't be surprised. Ryan wouldn't have called him in to his office just to shoot the breeze. "Oh?" he said. "Well, I'm probably interested, sir." The honorific formally acknowledged the change of topic back to business.
"It's not a long assignment," Ryan warned. "That's part of the problem. And the subject is very classified, even though it's over."
"What are we talking about?" Hammond asked. It wasn't like Ryan to beat around the bush.
"I'm assigning you to Cheyenne Mountain, taking over command from the late General Andrew West," Ryan told him. "I need someone to finish closing down the project he was working on."
"NORAD, sir?" Hammond asked with just a trace of puzzlement in his tone. He could see the thick file under Ryan's hand. "I didn't realize West was there. And when did he die?" He certainly would have heard about it if it had happened before his retirement.
"He wasn't exactly assigned to NORAD. He was working on a project based at Cheyenne Mountain," Ryan told him, "until he had an unexpected massive heart attack about three weeks ago."
"Ah," George said. He tried to think of what kind of project West might have been closing down at Cheyenne and came up empty. "Some kind of reorganization?"
"Not exactly," Ryan chuckled appreciatively. "You're going to love this, George." He slid the thick file across the table. "Would you believe the Air Force has sent an expedition to another planet?"
#
Hammond sat in his new office, twenty-seven floors below the surface, feeling completely astounded. He was a little surprised West hadn't had to face an inquiry. He wondered how he'd explained the requisition and subsequent disappearance of a nuclear bomb. The reports read like the wildest kind of science fiction.
Actually, he thought, rereading the names of the deceased, it had been incredibly screwed up and only just missed being a complete disaster. O'Neill's report made it clear that the alien they had encountered had intended to send the bomb back to Earth. He frowned, and looked at the officer's blank face in the attached photo. Even through the stiff military language of the report, a sense of the desperation of the moment came through. Colonel Jack O'Neill must be a military hardass of the most rigid sort, to have agreed to West's request to lead what was essentially a suicide mission.
His eye was caught by a notation at the end of the report. Or maybe he was just suicidal. Why else would he have come out of retirement for this mission and quit again immediately afterward? The personnel file had enough blacked out periods- some of them years long- to tell Hammond that O'Neill had spent much of his career in special operations, most of it highly classified. He wouldn't be the first or the last to be badly damaged by that kind of service.
He glanced briefly through the other files. Kawalsky and Ferretti had both been promoted following the mission. Not surprising, they'd evidently behaved courageously under circumstances far beyond what their country would normally ask of them. The several deceased soldiers' records he only glanced at. The last file was much thinner than the others. Jackson, the civilian. Hammond turned over the few pages, wondering what on earth West had told his family. With the notation, 'no next of kin', several things became clearer. "Andy, you insufferable bastard," Hammond growled under his breath. He'd never liked West, but he wouldn't have thought the man would have sent a civilian into harm's way. That he had callously assured that there was no family to make a fuss if something went wrong only made George more disgusted.
No mystery why the young man had volunteered, either. The military photo had captured the intelligence and curiosity in his eyes. Had West bothered to explain to the young man that it could be dangerous? They hadn't even sent animals through to ensure that live creatures would survive the trip before sending the human team.
There was a knock on the door. Hammond flipped the file closed and looked up. "Come in."
Sergent Harriman stuck his head in. "Sir? Um, Supply had a question about the disposition of these?"
Hammond took the envelopes that the man handed him. They were patches. Earth against a black field, surrounded by stars and superimposed on it the last stargate symbol, the one that the file described as the 'point of origin'. The symbol for Earth, he realized. "What are these?" he asked. "Something left over from the first mission?"
"No, sir," Harriman said. "They were designed when they put forward the exploration team proposal after the first mission returned. Of course the proposal never came to anything when they couldn't reach any other worlds through the gate."
Hammond looked at them. The design was attractive, if enigmatic. He looked at Harriman. The sergeant was unabashedly fascinated by the stargate and had learned everything he could about it. "What's the question?"
"I have a request from supply to scrap these," Harriman said, with a slightly wistful look at them. He passed the requisition to Hammond.
Hammond took it and looked it over consideringly. "Request denied," he said. "Tell them to keep them a while longer." He smiled at the sergeant. "They're not marked, perhaps on the last day we'll let people have them as souvenirs."
The sergeant brightened. "Yes, sir," he said, and closed the door after him.
Hammond put aside the personnel files, and started reading through the post-mission technical reports. They were heavy going. The last reports were from a Captain Carter at the Pentagon. He had been lobbying hard for the stargate program to be reinstated and was looking at possible alternate applications. Hammond glanced down the list and shrugged. No doubt it was interesting to the scientists, but this project was shutting down. It would be up to the ongoing research labs to decide if they cared to fund additional work. He set it aside.
This medical equipment, now. That was valuable and useful. Some of it could probably be transferred straight back to the Academy Hospital, but there was a note to contact supply to see what facilities around the world had requests in for similar units. He picked up the phone suppressing a sigh. Ryan had warned him this wasn't going to be an exciting job.
#
Hammond was looking at his calendar. Ten months to retirement. Probably another five of that to close this base, and another to finish the paperwork. Then the stargate would be dead and buried. It seemed rather a shame. Logically the gate ought to go to other places, but the number of combinations was so great they could dial for years and never find any.
The whoop of the siren caught him completely by surprise. As he popped out of his office, he realized that it was the alarm in the gate room. The gate room! Hammond ran for the stargate, wondering what the hell was going on.
He hustled after the guards, hearing gunfire as they approached the gate room. As he entered on their heels, he saw an enormous black man with a gold emblem on his forehead, holding a female sergeant hostage before the shimmering blue wormhole. Several fantastical figures in armor were standing in front of the gate, before the blue surface. One of them held a young female sergeant as a shield in front of him. Hammond yelled, "Hold your fire!" and surveyed the group. The man in golden armor appeared to be the one in charge. His eyes glowed momentarily. Then his helmet snapped shut, and he wheeled and strode through the wormhole, followed by the man holding the sergeant hostage. The wormhole shimmered and shredded into wisps of mist, then vanished.
Hammond walked slowly up the ramp, staring at the alien device, his mind working furiously. That was the glowing-eyed alien of the Abydos report. If he was still alive and the gate was still open, then O'Neill was a goddamned liar. He turned to see Major Samuels coming in, well after the firing had ceased, the toad. "Samuels!" he barked. "Sir?" Samuels said.
"Find me Colonel Jack O'Neill, and bring him here. I want to have a little talk with him."
#
Hammond composed himself behind his desk before he responded to Samuel's knock, "Come."
Samuels showed him in. O'Neill was dressed in civvies with a very non-regulation haircut. "General Hammond, Colonel Jack O'Neill."
"Retired," O'Neill qualified, with a laconic inflection that fell just short of insolence.
Hammond studied him. Intelligence he'd expected, but this wasn't the damaged self-destructive paranoid he'd visualized. He decided to start slow, "I can see that. Me, I'm on my last tour; time to start getting my thoughts together. Maybe write a book. You ever think about writing a book about your exploits in the line of duty?"
O'Neill responded laconically, "Thought about it. But then I'd have to shoot anyone who actually read it." After a moment of unresponsive silence from Hammond and Samuels, he continued. "That's a joke, sir. Most of my work for the past ten years has been classified."
Hammond said, "Yes, of course." There'd been nothing in the file to indicate a sense of humor. Actually, knowing West, he'd have thought a sense of humor would be a positive detriment to anyone serving under his command.
O'Neill was evidently not very patient, either. He asked into the silence, "Major Samuels mentioned something about the stargate?"
Hammond gave him a brief smile and kept his tone genial. "Down to business. I can do that." He rose and led the way out of his office. "This way." He had a few surprises for O'Neill, and he was interested to see how the man would react.
In the infirmary, he studied O'Neill's face as the doctor pulled back the sheet from the corpse of the dead alien. "Anyone you know, Colonel?"
The doctor offered, "They're not human."
O'Neill gave him a sarcastic look, "Ya think?"
Warner pointed out the slits on the alien's abdomen. "Best we can tell, these slits are actually a pouch similar to that found in a marsupial."
"Like a kangaroo," Samuels clarified unnecessarily.
The doctor said, "We haven't done an autopsy yet."
Hammond said, "These people - or aliens, whatever you want to call them - came through, killed four of my people and kidnapped another using advanced weapons."
"Weapons, sir?" O'Neill asked.
One of the officers handed the long stafflike weapon to Hammond, who passed it to O'Neill.
Samuels said, "We can't figure out how to operate it."
O'Neill turned it end for end, flipping a switch in the middle with his thumb. The ends of the staff snapped apart and crackled with energy. He flipped it back and the weapon shut off. Hammond was irritated that he had jumped as much as Samuels, "Seen one of those before, I take it?" He didn't remember reading about these in the reports.
"Yes, sir," confirmed O'Neill quietly, handing the weapon back.
#
Hammond's irritation was growing the longer he talked with O'Neill. By now he was positive that the colonel had lied, and that it was somehow connected to the three dead bodies in the morgue and the missing sergeant. He wondered if Kawalsky and Ferretti knew the truth, and if so, why they had gone along with it. Somewhere in this ball of lies there was a string that he could pull to unravel the whole mess. Perhaps the civilian was the key. Hammond asked, "Tell me about Daniel Jackson, Colonel."
The colonel wandered over to the window, looking at Kawalsky and Ferretti sitting down with another officer. "Why are they questioning my men?" he asked.
Hammond couldn't help respecting him for caring about his people, but he didn't let it show in his tone. The evasion did encourage him that he was pursuing the right line of questioning to get to the truth. "They're not your men anymore, Colonel. You retired. Daniel Jackson?"
"You read the report?" O'Neill said uncomfortably.
Hammond said, "Yes." He felt another unwilling flicker of respect. The man was clearly unhappy about lying to a superior officer.
"It's all there." O'Neill said.
"Is it?" Samuels said rather insultingly.
O'Neill ignored him, "What's this all about, General?"
"You didn't like Daniel Jackson, did you?" There was a chink in O'Neill's lies somewhere, and Hammond was sure it was Daniel Jackson. Losing men in battle was tragic, but went with the territory. The kind of man he was coming to see O'Neill as, would have taken the death of a civilian under his protection hard.
"Daniel was a scientist. He sneezed a lot. Basically, he was a geek, sir." Hammond's eyes narrowed. O'Neill sounded uncomfortable all right, but not guilty. Not angry at the loss of a man under his command. This was more like his evasion about the report. O'Neill was lying. So what? Jackson wasn't a geek? Why-Hammond felt a little light go on. The alien with the eyes wasn't dead. Suppose Jackson wasn't either? But surely O'Neill wouldn't have left him behind.. it must have been voluntary. Hammond suppressed a whistle of surprise. No wonder O'Neill was uncomfortable calling Jackson a geek. A man who'd spend four days on an alien planet and choose to stay there forever had guts.
"So you didn't have a lot of time for him." Samuels was saying. He might be a weasel, but he had his uses, Hammond reflected. He'd picked up the general's implication that O'Neill had failed his responsibility toward the civilian, and was using it like a chisel.
O'Neill responded defensively, "I didn't say that. He also saved my life and found a way home for my men and me. A little thing like that kind of makes a person grow on you, you know what I mean?"
O'Neill didn't sound like he was lying about that either. Hammond was beginning to get a glimmering of why he might have covered for Jackson. Hammond switched tactics. "According to the mission brief, your orders were to go through the Stargate to detect any possible threat to Earth and if found, to detonate a nuclear device and destroy the Gate on the other side."
"Yes." Hammond wondered again why O'Neill had volunteered for that mission. He wasn't striking Hammond as unbalanced, rather the reverse.
But if Jackson was alive, as Hammond was coming to suspect, then O'Neill couldn't have detonated the bomb. Hammond pressed, "But that's not what you did, is it?"
O'Neill said, "Not right away. Ra's forces overpowered my team and took the weapon before I could arm it."
"But with Dr. Jackson's help, you eventually regained control and did in fact detonate the weapon, yes?" Samuels asked.
"Yes." True. Hammond thought.
"So to the best of your knowledge, Daniel Jackson and everyone else you knew on Abydos is dead. Correct?" Hammond asked.
"That's correct." O'Neill confirmed. False. The longer the conversation went on, the more certain Hammond was he was reading O'Neill right.
Hammond could see this was going nowhere. Time for another change of tactics. He was glad he had had the bomb sent over from Petersen. "Good," he said, rising. "Then you won't mind if I authorize a go-ahead on our plan."
Minutes later, he achieved the result he had wanted. "General, you can't do that," O'Neill protested, staring at the bomb.
"Countdown's already started," Hammond said. "Unless you have something to add." 'No, colonel, I'm not bluffing.'
O'Neill stared at him for several moments, gauging his sincerity, then squared his shoulders and came to attention beside the general, "General Hammond. Sir."
Hammond turned and looked at him expectantly.
O'Neill confessed in a rather pained tone. "I regret to inform you that my report was not entirely accurate."
Hammond turned on him with a half-smile of triumph. "You didn't detonate the bomb."
O'Neill shook his head, "Oh, I did detonate the bomb, sir. It was aboard Ra's spacecraft, so it did kill him and eliminate the risk to Earth."
"However...?" Samuels prompted.
"However, Ra's ship was in orbit above the planet at the time. Neither the Gate nor anything else on the planet was destroyed. Daniel Jackson is alive and living with the people on Abydos."
Hammond could feel a slow burn of anger in his gut. All this time, they'd thought the Abydos gate had been neutralized and Earth was safe, when actually they'd been vulnerable. The front line of defense for the planet had been an illegal poker game. He demanded, "You violated direct orders! Why?"
O'Neill argued, "Because the people of Abydos are no threat to us. They deserve to be left alone."
Hammond told him, "That's not up to you."