“Where’s Sam?” he asked. The candy did indeed seem to ground him. Daniel told him. “Oh. Enki, what’re we doing?”
The old man turned to him. “As soon as Sam finds me the necessary materials, we’re blowing that thing back to whatever hell it came from,” he told Jack. “It's clearly from an alternate reality, which is why neither my people or the Asgard know what it is. That’s also why your people have never spotted it before. I think I can get rid of the entities and leave the underlying dome intact. The dome itself is just a structure. Most of the compounds are gases, and like everything else, every gas has a poison. I think those creatures are gas, and I think I know their poison.”
Jack took him at his word. No, he didn’t want to look at Enki’s scribbling. When he felt ready to stand, he took the hands held out by Daniel and Ninurta and heaved himself up. The world spun for a moment and then righted itself.
“Admiral Williams, how about we have a conference?” Jack suggested. The admiral gave a white-faced nod and they went to his office. Jack dialed out and Maynard got on the line with Hayes. Jack updated all of them on the situation.
“I’m not quite sure what Enki has in mind, but he seems to think he can poison these things,” he told the group. “Listen, whatever he’s up to, that black spot is covering a dome. Inside that dome are the bodies of everyone who has ever gone missing in the Triangle, including all the ships and planes. There are a lot of dead bodies, but there are living ones, too. We’re going to do our best to get those people out. If we can get rid of the entities and leave the dome intact, we can get salvage in there, document the ships, and recover the bodies. The people still living, we will try and get out right away. As soon after Enki does his thing right away.”
“How many people are we looking at, Jack?” Hayes asked.
“Not sure,” Jack said. “I didn’t count ‘em, but I’m guessing a couple hundred.”
“Dear Lord... Are your people ready, Admiral?” Hayes asked.
“Yes, sir, they are,” Williams assured him.
Enki beamed up to Thor’s ship for a collaboration of minds. Several hours later, he and Sam were back. “Thor is going to bring his ship down,” Enki told Jack. “We came up with a gas I think will work, but he needs to be directly over the entity. He’s going to beam the gas down into it.”
Jack called the troops to order and had them standby while Williams called out to his ships waiting on the water.
“How serious of a water displacement are we talking about?” Williams asked Enki and Jack.
“No way to tell,” Enki said.
“And if there is an explosion or a serious displacement, we could be talking about a tidal wave,” Williams told them. “Is the area under there that big?” Since Enki didn't know if any of the area under the dome extended into an alternate reality line, or even deeper under the ocean floor, he had no idea how big a bang they were talking about. Jack called the FEMA director, Ms Rosario, while Enki had Thor put on hold.
The public warning was given, without explanation, and Florida’s east coast, along with the Bermuda Islands, Bahamas, Cuba, and Puerto Rico scrambled to sandbag their coasts. Georgia and South Carolina were given a warning, just in case, but they didn’t need to do anything yet. FEMA gave the others twelve hours. The base was emptied of all personnel to assist with the shoring up of their part of the coast line. From the janitors and grounds keepers all the way up to Jack and Admiral Williams, all hands worked. With hurricanes an annual occurrence, the east coast knew how to prepare quickly.
At the end of the twelve hours, everyone stood outside and watched the ocean. Jack called Thor and gave the go-ahead. Sam was watching her computer as Capt. Boggs monitored with the mikku. A low, throbbing hum filled the air as Thor’s ship came slowly into the atmosphere. Naval personnel dropped their jaws as the huge alien ship stopped to hover over the water. A few personnel unobtrusively slapped hands and turned over bet money to others.
“Now,” Thor calmly told Jack through the radio at his shoulder. Jack watched the water but nothing seemed to be happening. It’s gas, he told himself, not a bomb.
“Look!” Sam shouted. Jack and Enki quickly looked over her shoulder. The black spot seemed to be fading. Enki tuned out and Jack seemed to sense Enki’s presence heading out into the water. He followed. Another kind of roar filled his ears, this time it was of the entities dying from the poisonous gas that was beamed into their protective dome.
“The dome can be collapsed with no displacement,” Thor reported over the speaker. People relaxed with sighs of relief.
“Clear!” Sam shouted again.
“The dome will not hold for long,” Thor warned. “It is already beginning to show signs of stress. I will beam up all bodies and set them down in the prepared locations.”
Military and medical personnel hurried to positions as living bodies began to appear any place that had room for them. By the following morning, over three hundred people were being attended to by medical personnel evac’d in to handle the emergency. Thousands of dead bodies had begun to pile up, some of them hundreds of years old. The entities had removed any ID tags from military personnel, so the only way ID’s could be guessed at was through the identification of the ships which were, at that moment, being scoured by SCUBA-suited divers.
Sam assisted with medical, while Jack made his way slowly through those who were conscious, and took information from them while getting ID tags around their wrists. Daniel sat and talked with people, helping them to begin coping with the situation.
Jack wasn’t sure what stunned him more: eliminating the entities or the fact that some of the people living were well over a hundred years old, and looked no older than the day they were originally taken. A couple of people claimed to be born in the eighteen hundreds, and from their speech and their outlook, he believed them. He wondered what his world would look like when he was another hundred years old.
Chapter 37
Jack spent a couple of days debriefing the people they had found trapped beneath the Bermuda Triangle until Davis reminded him that he had people to do that for him. The rescuees from the latter half of the twentieth century were in shock, but they had no problem believing that they had not only awakened in the twenty-first century, they had awakened with the assistance of aliens. People prior to that were having a harder time with the time shift. Only a few wanted their families traced. FEMA came in and took over, for which Jack had been grateful; his job was over, the bad guys were gone. He was exhausted and didn’t care to think about his role in this particular exercise. The public was sitting back, waiting to see what Jack was going to do next, having solved the Bermuda Triangle issue. Big Foot? Loch Ness? Enki patted cheeks and twinkled at Sam, and Ninurta gave out cheerful rough hugs before they hitched a ride with Thor.
A man who looked about Jack’s age looked him over from one of the make-shift cots that had been set up in the warehouse.
“Excuse me,” the man asked politely. Jack squatted down next to the cot. “I don’t recognize your uniform; may I ask its nature?” It took Jack a moment before he realized that the man was one of the really old ones.
“I’m Jack O’Neill,” he said. “My uniform is of the United States Air Force. I’m a General.” He tapped his stars.
“Air Force?” the man repeated, looking over the various strange insignia. His salute seemed more automatic than any real sense of recognition. Jack shook his hand.
“Yes, sir,” Jack nodded. “It came out of the Army Signal Corps in 1907 with the use of balloons. Lots of history happened, and in 1947 the air force was officially born.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” the man said with a confused frown. “What do you do with the air?”
“In the early nineteen hundreds, two brothers invented a machine that flies in the air,” Jack told him. He considered a smart-ass answer, and realized that the man was honestly confused. “It’s called an airplane. As it developed, it came to be used not only for transporting
people and objects, but some of the designs had guns put on them and they were used in battle.”
The man was astounded. Jack thought for a moment as he looked around. “Be right back,” he told the man. He went to a far wall and took down a photograph, bringing it back to the man. “This is the USS Montgomery,” he said, pointing to the ship. “See those things with wings on her deck? Those are fighter planes. They’re Navy fighters, because this is a Navy base, but a plane is a plane.”
“And they fly in the air?” the man asked, taking the photo from him for a closer look.
“Yes, sir, they certainly do,” Jack nodded. He sat with the man, Charles Brooks, for a while and talked with him about the history of the US military. Seems Mr. Brooks was a veteran from 1864. Jack made sure Mr. Brooks had his chart notated appropriately. Hayes was currently in a very tight huddle with quite a few people over the issue of not only the people in general, but also any military personnel that were found. Jack was fascinated by some of the stories the man had to tell, once Jack got him over his shock. Mr. Brooks still couldn’t get himself to allow a female doctor to examine him, though, much to Dr. Lam’s impatient huff.
Daniel was having a quiet war with social services over the children. Social services had no imagination and was insisting on placing the children into immediate foster care. Daniel was throwing a fit and insisting that the children were in enough shock, there was no way they should be placed in the incompetent hands of social services. In a fit of pique, Daniel had himself beamed up to Prometheus and from there, who knows where. Jack didn’t know what he was up to, but when Daniel got into that mood, he knew enough to stand back. He hoped social services picked up on that hint.
Jack finally rounded up his main people and left support staff to fix the mess. He was sorry but he had a birthday to attend.
Back home, Katie was claiming tummy illness so Jack let her stay home from school. At lunch, he brought her up a mug of soup and sat it on her bedside table. He sat on the edge of her bed and straightened her covers. Getting back to something so normal took away the stress from the past week.
“You’re stomach is upset because you are upset,” he told her. She did look nauseous, but he knew otherwise. “Your mother isn’t here.”
Katie started to cry and she turned over. Jack turned her toward him and took her into his arms, holding her against his shoulder. He stroked her hair and let her cry. He knew the kids had bouts of mommy-withdrawals, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except let them work it out. Katie and Matthew had the worst of it; Jack wasn’t sure if Davy completely understood what had happened or if it was more a case of seeing the best in the worst of situations. Davy had what Jack once heard of as a Pollyanna attitude; but was it part of Davy’s mental outlook or was it part of his growing ‘otherness’ that a lot of other kids were acquiring? Once Jack sat back and thought about it, he felt that Jerrie may be right in the way Davy was changing. Katie, though, missed her mother in a way only a daughter could miss her mother. Katie was becoming a young woman and she needed her mother. He wished Sam was around more. Jack considered calling his mother.
“Honey, if you don’t want a party, we don’t have to have one,” he told Katie when she began to calm down.
“Could we just have a quiet dinner?” she asked huskily.
“Yes, we can,” he assured her. “How about a birthday breakfast, and then I take you out for a dinner date? Just the two of us. Would you like that?”
Yes, Katie would like that.
So, in the morning, the family gathered for breakfast and to give out their gifts. Michael put a delicate necklace around her neck. He opened the little cameo that was attached and showed her that it was hollow. She looked and saw a small picture of her mother’s face pasted inside. Katie threw her arms around her grandfather and hugged him tight. Jack was impressed; no one had to coach his brother on that one.
Daniel made waffles for breakfast and smothered them with whipped cream and berries. A candle was put on Katie’s and everyone sang to her.
“Can’t we have cake for breakfast?” Davy asked plaintively. He didn’t know why everyone laughed, but he smiled in response.
Jack let Katie stay home from school again, and she spent the day with Maggie. Jack’s next headache came from Reynolds.
“They’re gone,” he reported.
“Who’s gone?” Jack asked.
“The kids,” Reynolds said. “From the Triangle. All those kids disappeared overnight.”
Jack looked at the phone. “Just the kids?” he asked. “None of the adults?”
“Just the kids,” Kevin said. “No one claims to have seen or heard a thing, and guards were on the doors 24/7. The dogs aren’t getting a scent, either.”
Jack talked with Maynard and Hayes and wondered how to put out an Amber Alert on children who weren’t supposed to exist. Jack was stumped. Not even Major Davis had a suggestion.
“Daniel, did you do something I’m not supposed to know about?” Jack called Daniel and asked him.
“No, I didn’t,” Daniel said. Jack heard the sincerity and left it alone.
A few of the rescuees, those from recent times, were reunited with family after a long and arduous debriefing. No one knew anything, they had been unconscious the entire time. The older people were given an option; be reeducated to modern society or go the Alpha site and work their own piece of land. A few who were farmers were daring enough to head out to the site with the promise of free land to call their own. The Alpha site had oceans, too, so sailors also went. The SGC sent along building materials and supplies for ships and houses. The rest would be up to the colonists. Several enterprising social workers and anthropologists went with them, to help them adjust. Mr. Brooks went along, extremely uncomfortable with what he had been learning about modern society.
“It may be easier to adjust to an entire unoccupied planet, than to the modern language, music, tv, pollution, noise, and everything,” Daniel commented.
“Yes, there are times I’d like to find an unoccupied planet,” Jack said. “Are you sure you didn’t do anything with those kids?”
“I swear,” Daniel said, holding up a hand. “I went and had a hissy in Hayes’ face and then I came back to the base. That’s it. If it’s any consolation, I got him to agree to foster the kids out to SGC personnel and others with security clearance who are in the know. I don’t know what happened to them, although evidence points to a beam-out.”
Jack had to agree, but damned if he knew who beamed the kids out. Markham certainly didn’t…. Jack was getting a sneaking suspicion, it smelled faintly of leather, but he wasn’t ready to acknowledge it.
He dressed up and took Katie to a quiet, adult-oriented restaurant. Candles flickered on tables, soft music was played by a pianist in a far corner, and the napkins were cloth, not paper. Katie looked around with interest.
“Did you ever take real dates here?” she asked him after they were seated.
“A couple of times,” he said with a nod. “And you are a real date.”
“No, I’m not,” she protested. “You know what I mean. This is a fancy restaurant where men take women out for dates, not where dads and uncles take their daughters and nieces.”
He looked at her with her pretty dress and her hair pinned up, make-up nicely done by Cassie. He was glad the girls were making friends; Katie needed a friend, and Cassie had one more person she could talk to without having to be careful of what she said.
“What I know is that you are turning into a very lovely young woman,” he told her. “I had always thought that if I had a daughter of my own, I’d be proud to take her on dates. Daughters and nieces deserve dates. Even after I walk you down an aisle and hand you over to another man, I still want dates with my favorite little girl.”
Katie flushed and sniffled. “Can you do that?” she asked after a moment, gesturing to the dance floor.
“Yes, I can,” he nodded. He stood up, buttoned his jacket, and held out a hand to
her. He led her to the floor and patiently taught her how to dance to something other than that ear-splitting stuff she was always listening to. The pianist smiled at them and played something easy.
Their first course was waiting for them when they got back to the table. Jack allowed her to take one sip of his wine.
“Grape juice with a kick,” she said, her eyes watering slightly from the alcohol. She looked around and then leaned in. “Women are staring at you,” she whispered.
“My face has been all over the news and internet,” he said. She cocked her head and considered him.
“No,” she shook her head. “You’ve always been just Uncle Jack, but…. You’re handsome. I hadn’t noticed before. I have a cute Uncle Dad.”
It was Jack’s turn to flush.
“My dad never did things like this with me,” she said, picking at her salad. “I tried so hard to make him happy, and he always told me what I did wrong. I sent him a couple of emails. He never answered. I didn’t get a Christmas card from him or a birthday card. I don’t need a present, but a card would have been nice. Even a phone call.”
A tear ran down her face and she hastily wiped it away, not looking at the other diners. Jack took her hand from across the table. “Baby, no one will ever be able to do anything right for him,” he told her softly. “It’s part of his illness. I know you want him to love you, it’s normal and natural to want the love and approval of your father, but he isn't able to love anyone except himself. I couldn’t love you more if you were my real daughter. I always wanted a daughter; your mother woke up that hunger in me when she was born. I even changed my Will, declaring you and your bothers and sister my children, so as far as I’m concerned, you are my daughter. That’s how much I love you.”
“And as for cards,” he said, patting her. He reached into his pocket and handed her an envelope. She opened it and looked inside the card. Her eyes opened wide and she screeched. Diners looked at them, a few smiling indulgently, others frowning with high-brow disapproval.
The Anunnaki Unification, Book 2: A Staraget SG-1 Fan Fiction Story Page 29