“Yes.” And…?
“It’s all there.”
“Is it?” Samuels challenged. It was his turn to play bad cop for the general. Besides, he really wanted to know.
The implication was clear; it brought O’Neill around to face him. But the window didn’t transmit sound very well. There was no way to know what Kawalsky and Ferretti were saying.
“What’s this all about, General?” O’Neill asked harshly.
“You didn’t like Daniel Jackson, did you?” Hammond asked.
That wasn’t what O’Neill was expecting. He shrugged. “Daniel was a scientist. He sneezed a lot. Basically, he was a… geek. Sir.”
“So you didn’t have a lot of time for him.”
O’Neill took exception. “I didn’t say that. He also saved my life and found the way home for me and my men. A little thing like that kinda makes a person grow on you.”
Hammond ruffled some papers, never taking his eyes from the tall man in front of him. “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.”
“But that’s not what you did, is it?” Samuels leaped in again. The major was good at this, Hammond noted. He’d make a decent half of an interrogation team, maybe. Someday.
A shadow of defensiveness crossed O’Neill’s dark eyes. “Not right away. Ra’s forces overpowered my team and took the weapon before I could arm it.”
One of the signs of a really good officer, Hammond had always felt, was how he was at lying to his superiors. O’Neill was prevaricating, and he was pretty bad at it. Hammond smiled, tigerish.
Samuels saw it too, and went for the kill. “But with Dr. Jackson’s help, you eventually regained control? And did, in fact, detonate the weapon? Yes?”
O’Neill cast an almost desperate glance through the window to his two men. His answer, however, was prompt and straightforward. “Yes.”
Hammond took over. “So, to the best of your knowledge, Daniel Jackson and everyone else you knew on Abydos are dead. Is that correct?”
O’Neill hesitated, swallowed. His tongue touched his lower lip. Aha, Hammond thought. You’ve got a tell, boy. “That’s… correct.”
“Good,” the general purred. “Then you won’t mind if I authorize a go-ahead on our plan.” Standing, he led O’Neill out of the office, down the corridor, and into an elevator.
O’Neill took one last agonized look through the window at his men and followed him.
“This quartz material the Stargates are made of,” Hammond said musingly, never taking his eyes off O’Neill’s, “it must be tough stuff if it can withstand a Mark 3.”
“We sent a robot probe through after we got back, sir. It was flattened on the other end. Obviously the Abydos Stargate had been buried in the rubble.” He was stalling. Hammond could tell that O’Neill could hear it in his voice as well as the general himself could.
“Well, somehow it got unburied,” the general informed him.
They entered the Gate room.
The place was buzzing with activity. Hammond watched as O’Neill glanced around the room, at first registering only the signs of the damage resulting from the firefight, then focusing on the radio-controlled cart at the bottom of the ramp and the large, glistening metal cylinder it carried. Technicians swarmed around the device, making adjustments, reading ohm-meters, taking notes. A look of sheer horror crossed O’Neill’s face.
“My God,” he whispered. Then, louder, “You’re sending another bomb?”
Hammond nodded almost jovially. “A Mark 5 this time. If these creatures did reopen the Abydos gate, we intend to reseal it for good.” As he spoke, a digital timer on the cylinder’s side lit up and started ticking off seconds.
“General, you can’t do that!”
Hammond’s eyes grew wide, smiling, innocently inquiring. “The countdown has already started…. Unless, of course, you have something to add?”
The general could almost hear the gears working in the other man’s head. When O’Neill stepped forward to stand before him, for the first time the colonel stood at attention, ramrod straight, his eyes focused steadily on Hammond’s.
“General Hammond, sir,” he said, his voice staccato, emotionless. “I regret to inform you that my report was not entirely accurate.”
“You didn’t detonate the bomb.” Surprise, surprise. He’d known there had to be something wrong in that report; aliens couldn’t invade out of a Gate shattered to glowing radioactive rubble. And he’d known it had to have been O’Neill at the core of it. It had been his mission. His report.
His lie.
O’Neill’s line of sight never wavered, but his tongue touched his lip again. There’s that tell again, boy. Tough, isn’t it? “No, I did detonate the bomb. It was aboard Ra’s spacecraft. It did kill him and eliminate the risk to earth.”
“However?” Samuels said triumphantly.
“However,” O’Neill admitted painfully, to Hammond, not Samuels, “Ra’s ship was in orbit above the planet at the time, sir. Neither the gate nor anything else on the planet was destroyed. Daniel Jackson is alive and living with the people on Abydos.”
And as a result four—probably five—good soldiers are dead. With an effort Hammond restrained his roar. “You violated direct orders? Why?”
“Because the people of Abydos are no threat to us. They deserve to be left alone.”
“That’s not up to you—” Hammond began.
O’Neill interrupted. “With all due respect, if I hadn’t reported the Gate on the other side was destroyed, you would have sent another bomb. Just like you were about to. It wasn’t necessary to let those people die; the threat from Ra was gone.”
Apparently confession was good for the military soul as well; O’Neill had regained his mental balance and self-assurance.
Major Samuels wasn’t ready to let go. “What about that probe we sent through? It got crushed instantly.”
O’Neill turned slightly to him, relaxing his ramrod posture. “After we went home, Jackson buried the Gate in rocks, making my return—or anyone else’s—impossible.”
Hammond had heard the confession, but forgiveness was still up in the air. “Those four bodies lying in the morgue say otherwise.” He turned to the technicians, who had paused in their scurrying to eavesdrop. “We’ll send the bomb through on schedule.”
“General, you can’t do that!”
The boy had a pretty good roar himself. However, O’Neill was still a colonel—retired—addressing a general. “Oh, I can’t?” Hammond said dangerously.
“There are innocent people on that planet,” O’Neill protested.
“There are innocent people here,” Hammond lashed back. He drew a deep breath, calming himself before continuing. “I have my orders too, Colonel. I obey mine.” To the MPs standing behind Samuels, he said, “Take Colonel O’Neill to the holding room. Give him some time to think about things while I decide what to do with him.”
The MPs stepped forward. O’Neill, ironic to the last, executed a textbook salute before turning on his heel to march off between them.
CHAPTER THREE
The MPs ushered him into his “cell,” a small windowless room that had obviously been someone’s office not too long before. It had been enhanced with a couple of bunks and a small table to go with the gunmetal gray desk.
Charles Kawalsky bolted to his feet, hand at his brow. “Colonel O’Neill, sir!”
O’Neill looked at him wearily, refusing to remember his own starched reaction not that long before. “I’m retired, Kawalsky. Lose the salute.”
Kawalsky’s hand drifted down, O’Neill grabbed it with both hands and shook it. See? Civilian, he told himself. This is what civilians do, remember?
Kawalsky sat, off balance mentally if not physically. “Me and Ferretti didn’t tell them anything,” he said, trying to be reassuring.
It misfired, th
rough no fault of his own; O’Neill was sure the room was bugged, that he’d been put in here with a member of his former command just so Hammond could hear what they had to say. But he’d told the truth now, all the truth that mattered, and he didn’t care much what Hammond heard. He was trying to think of an argument to keep the general from sending that Mark 5 through the Gate. There were women and kids over there, innocent victims of Ra. They didn’t deserve to die because of a paranoid general.
Though, he admitted to himself with a wrench, he could understand exactly where Hammond was coming from.
It didn’t matter if he understood, approved, or even liked it, though. He’d had direct orders and had consciously chosen to disobey them. He’d never done that before in his whole career—in his whole life.
The fact that it was the right thing to do didn’t mean he could avoid the consequences.
But it was his responsibility, his choice. There was no reason Kawalsky and Ferretti should have to suffer for it. He owed it to his men to make things right for them. “I appreciate that,” he said.
“Hey,” Kawalsky went on defiantly, “those kids on Abydos saved my life too.”
“The kids. Yeah…” The kids. Especially the one kid who had wormed his way past all the defenses…
“I mean, they were the whole reason we kept the secret, right?” Kawalsky was still talking as if they were old comrades exchanging reminiscences at a bar somewhere. “That one kid idolized you. Remember him? Weird name, what was it…?”
“Skaara.” Skaara. Skaara, who could never take Charlie’s place but had carved a place of his own in a mourning father’s heart. The thought brought up a vivid image of a little, wool-clad Arab kid with long dark hair and bright eyes.
And that reminded him of another kid, with the same sharp eyes but blond hair instead, and he flinched.
Kawalsky mocked up an awkward salute. “Remember how he was always saluting you?”
O’Neill forced a smile. “Yeah. My kid used to do that when he was little.” His voice stayed steady. He was proud of that. “Skaara kinda reminded me of him.”
Kawalsky blinked. “You an’ me went through that whole mission together. I never even knew you had a son.”
“He died just before the Abydos mission.” O’Neill didn’t want to continue the conversation. He didn’t want to go on to the next memory, of a gleaming semiautomatic pistol lying on pale white carpet, a small empty hand lying nearby. And he refused the next image entirely.
“I’m sorry, sir, I had no idea.”
O’Neill shook his head. He thought about saying more and decided not to. That wound wasn’t healed. He didn’t deserve to have it heal.
It had been a year since the two of them had seen each other, and Kawalsky was eager to talk about what he’d been doing, his promotion to major, even how he’d been summoned in the dead of night to return to the Stargate base. O’Neill listened, provided the proper noises to keep the man talking, and buried himself in his own thoughts.
Abydos. Better to think of Abydos, of Skaara, than Charlie. It still filled him with wonder, knowing he was one of the first modern men to walk on an alien planet. He’d been brought up on Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, had stayed up all night to watch the Apollo landing. But as he grew older and the space program kept getting cut back, he’d abandoned his childhood dreams of being an astronaut and applied himself to more practical matters. He’d kept an eye on the Voyager and Explorer reports, shook his head over the Mir snafus, but never really thought seriously about going into space.
And then after Charlie died—he blinked at the stab of emotional pain—he’d never really thought seriously of anything at all.
And after all that, going into space turned out to be as easy as falling off a log. Or falling through a looking glass. And there was a wonderland with three moons waiting on the other side. A planet full of people from earth. People he couldn’t bring himself to destroy.
After a while even Kawalsky ran down. O’Neill couldn’t find anything to talk about. The two men sat. Waited.
They were grateful for the sound of the twisting doorknob.
Hammond stood in the doorway, a pair of MPs at parade rest behind him. Kawalsky rocketed to attention. O’Neill got to his feet more slowly.
“How many people did you say are on Abydos?” the general asked. He looked as if he’d bitten into something awful but was determined to swallow it anyway.
Aha, thought O’Neill. The old man had been listening after all. “That we saw? Maybe five thousand.” At least. But he wasn’t going to shade his reporting anymore.
The general came in and sat on one of the cots, facing his prisoners, waving Kawalsky to at ease.
“Does this mean you’re reconsidering sending the bomb?” O’Neill asked. Does this mean you’re reconsidering blowing Skaara and Daniel Jackson to radioactive flinders?
“It means I’m open to suggestions,” Hammond replied heavily. He had the air of a man who’d spent a lot of time thinking, a lot of time on the phone with the powers that be.
“General, let me take a team through the Gate. We’ll find out who these aliens are.” He waved at the other man. “Kawalsky and I have been there before. We know the lay of the land, and we know the people.”
Hammond wanted to be convinced. He wanted it so much, O’Neill saw, that he had to resist the suggestion. “You think you know. Jackson could be dead. You don’t know what you’d be walking into.”
The memory of four dead enlisted personnel, the scarring on the walls in the Gate room, was clear in his eyes. O’Neill acknowledged it. If the Ra aliens were using the Abydos Gate again, there was no telling what had happened to the people on the other side. They might be prisoners. Dead. Vanished. On the other hand…
Maybe no. Maybe Skaara and Jackson were still there.
He could go back to the stars. And he didn’t even have to be assigned to NASA first. “One way to find out.”
Hammond sighed and nodded. Kawalsky, not nearly as enthusiastic about whatever wild idea O’Neill might have, merely looked at his former commander.
“Right,” said Hammond. “We’ll have the prototype probe shipped from MIT.”
“No, no,” O’Neill contradicted. “We don’t need a probe.”
“We don’t?” Kawalsky said faintly.
O’Neill looked around the room, spotted what he was looking for on the gunmetal gray table. “This’ll do.” It was perfect. It was exactly what they needed.
It was a box of white Kleenex.
O’Neill led the charge out the door, catching Kawalsky flat-footed. Hammond followed, game but confused. The major lunged to catch up.
Minutes later, O’Neill, Kawalsky, Samuels, and Hammond stood in the control room overlooking the Stargate. Twenty soldiers in flak jackets, armed to the teeth, pointed rifles at the Gate below, their hands shifting uneasily on their weapons. Behind them, civilian technicians were hunched over their equipment. A computer screen over their heads showed symbols, shifting.
“Chevron four, encoded,” one of the technicians announced.
Hammond was still looking at the Kleenex box. “Care to explain this concept?”
As they watched, the inner ring of the Stargate rotated, matching symbols with those in the outer ring. Above their heads the symbols on the screen shifted correspondingly, like a combination lock clicking into place. As each one slipped into place, a chevron-shaped frame on the gate glowed, and along the side of the computer screen another symbol was recorded.
“Chevron five, encoded.”
The inner circle spun back almost 360 degrees.
“Jackson has allergies,” O’Neill said absently, his full attention on the Gate. He still carried the box of tissues in his hand.
Behind him, Kawalsky grinned. “I get it!”
Samuels didn’t.
“Chevron six, encoded.”
“He’ll know it came from me and not, with all due respect, sir, from someone like you.”
&
nbsp; Hammond’s brows knitted briefly.
Smiling, carrying his no-lotion, unscented, unmistakable message, O’Neill headed down from the control room to the Gate, leaving the others staring after him.
The room was vibrating. Shaking. The inner wheel rotated.
“Chevron seven, encoded.”
A fountain of blue light, quantum particles as disciplined as water, blasted into the room, reaching nearly to the bottom of the ramp where O’Neill stood. He was much calmer about it than anyone else watching.
The funnel snapped backward, through the back of the Gate, and then leveled off, shimmering.
A very self-possessed Jack O’Neill walked up the ramp and without hesitation poked the box of tissue through the wall of light. The Kleenex vanished.
Moments later, the Gate shut down. Silence descended on the room. Technicians and military men stared at each other.
O’Neill returned to the control room to see the computer image replaced by a star map. He watched with interest as a small X, indicating the probable path of the box of Kleenex, described a path along a probable wormhole between the Stargate on Earth and the one on Abydos.
The chief technician cleared his throat. “The, um, the object should reach its destination in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One.
“The object should now be through the Abydos Stargate.” The words echoed in the room. They were all holding their breath.
“Now what?” Hammond demanded.
O’Neill grinned. “Now we wait. If Daniel’s still around, he’ll know what the message means.”
“What if the aliens got it?” Samuels wasn’t handling O’Neill’s attitude at all well.
O’Neill pretended horror at the very concept. “Well, they could be blowing their noses right now!”
“They could be planning an attack,” Samuels said stiffly.
O’Neill shook his head. “Oh, c’mon, Samuels, let me be the cynic around here.” He gave the other man a look that carried the clear message, I’ve been there. Have you?
Then, looking back to Hammond, he added, “Sir, this could take some time.”
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