Work Text:
This is going to be a dog-and-pony-show run, he gathers. Some General he's never even heard of, not that that's really hard given the way his career has gone, but the more "permanent" military people at McMurdo are tripping all over themselves and saying his name (O'Neill, he hears) in hushed voices like it's fucking Patton come back from the dead. So apparently he's hot shit in their line of work. John pictures grey hair going bald, red-cheeked and sweaty, a portly barely-passes-the-physical build. Pocket-protectors and a scientific calculator, and enough attitude to shame a new fighter pilot. Spooks and R&D could be a worse pain in the ass than fucking Naval officers, and that was saying something.
He goes through the walk-around in a grumpy mood, breath steaming as the sun climbed, because it's perfect weather right now and he's going to be babysitting some arrogant paper-pusher instead of seeing what the real G-limits of the chopper are. He already knows it isn't the manual's +4G max load.
"Sir!" the call, muffled by his flight helmet and the chopper's bubble, comes in the middle of the pre-start checklist, so he waves a hand at it and ignores it. When he finishes and looks up, a Marine noncom from the science contingent is giving him an outraged look for the brush-off. The visiting general is standing next to him, looking about as pleased as John feels.
"Sir," he acknowledges, waving a salute at the brass, who returns it with a wince John ignores. It's fucking Antarctica, not West Point. He looks at the Marine, who's glaring at him like he thought it might hurt him. "Thanks, I've got him now," he tells the man, deliberately casual, and the pain-factor in the glare increases by a factor of ten before he comes to picture-perfect attention, snaps out a crisp salute, and barks out something appropriate before marching off to wherever he spends his time. John tries to keep himself from rolling his eyes, with limited success, and eyes the general he's going to be flying out.
The guy is not as anticipated. For one thing, he's tall, and looks pretty fit. For another, John's pretty sure he'd spotted the guy rolling his eyes when the Marine went all parade-ground at him. But that was probably his imagination.
"Just hop in the left seat here, sir," he says, looking back at the instruments. "I'll finish up the checks and we'll be out of here in five."
The general doesn't say a damned thing, which is a relief for the moment but might be seriously bad news, and John steals another look at him as he climbs into the co-pilot seat and straps in. He's familiar enough with helicopters, gets his harness and headset squared away with minimum fuss and stays well away from the controls as John runs through the checks and gets the rotor going. So that's a tick in his favour. "I'm just going to call McMurdo now, sir," he cautions before he keys the mike, and the general just waves a gloved hand negligently.
Clearance is easy to get – the airspace isn't exactly crowded, in Antarctica - and they lift off clean and get going, no transponder and low until they get in behind some terrain. McMurdo Station doesn't know exactly where the "research station" is, and the pilots try to keep it that way. It's not likely they've succeeded by more than a hundred square miles or so, but it's procedure.
The General, once they level off into boring flight, starts up with the small talk, asking him about where he's from, where he's been posted, what else he's flown. He talks about signing up, the decision to go helicopter instead of fighter, the crap he took for that from some unimaginative instructors. Talks about almost being roped into instructing himself, the one time (and what a disaster that would have been – he's actually matured since then, hostile witnesses to the contrary or not). Skips lightly over the deployments to the sandbox, avoids talking about flying support for special forces. And waxes eloquent about the various things the Air Force has seen fit to let him fly, which was a lot, including some stuff that wasn't even Air Force, and that was sure to get him talking about something not related to Afghanistan.
"That's a lot of training for the Antarctic," O'Neill responds, a world of nuanced sarcasm in his voice. John's been noticing that this guy didn't seem to speak in tones other than sarcasm, which had been endearing him to John right up until that comment.
"It was the one continent I'd never set foot on," he returns blithely, passing it off as an eccentricity and hoping this O'Neill (who was much sharper than expected) would leave it at that, unlike the previous general he'd flown in, months ago.
"It's one of my least favourite continents," O'Neill declares with feeling.
"I kinda like it here," John says in the tone he's cultivated for more than a year. This gets him a disbelieving look he can feel boring into the side of his head.
"You like it here?"
He smirks. "Yes, sir," he replies, and O'Neill lapses into silence for ten minutes. Then there's a loose-weapon warning from their destination (a "drone", which, what?), and then things get incredibly exciting, and after he dives into the snow and the...drone...skids to a dead stop a couple inches from O'Neill's outstretched hand, he finds himself glad that the heavyweight winter flight suit effectively masks the stubborn hard-on the whole situation has given him. He'd have been in for some comments, if this were Kandahar.
"Well," he manages after a second. "That was...different."
"For me...not so much," the supposed egg-head R&D general says from across the cockpit, and he begins to rethink his assumptions on that score.