[Stargate SG-1 03] - The First Amendment

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  A flash of anger entered O’Neill’s eyes and then was gone. “I don’t know what he came for, Dave, but it wasn’t this. Let the guy go.”

  Maybe he wasn’t just in the way, then. Was that a relief?

  Not yet, Kinsey decided.

  Morley angled himself to the computer console and used the hand holding the grenade to slam one of the keys on the keyboard. A roar from the stone circle made Kinsey jump, as the inner part of the circle rotated and something clanked into place.

  “I knew we should have locked down those things,” came a voice from nearby. A woman’s voice. Probably the one who’d been standing behind O’Neill in the hallway.

  Morley ignored it and hit another symbol. His thumb slipped a little off the grenade plunger and Kinsey could feel the instant tension in the room, and especially in his captor’s body, until it was back in place, substituting for the missing pin. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the giant wheel spinning again, like a combination lock, or maybe a roulette wheel. What was that thing?

  “You didn’t believe me,” Morley was saying. “You thought I screwed up. But nobody could have pulled those men out, not even you, the mighty O’Neill. I’ll show you. I’ll show him. I’ll show everybody.” He hit another symbol.

  “Remind me to update our internal security plan,” O’Neill said to no one in particular, never taking his eyes off Morley.

  The wheel spun.

  From somewhere else in the room, a hollow voice said, “Chevron three encoded…”

  A glimpse of movement above his line of vision made Kinsey look up to see the broad window of an observation room, one story up, overlooking the drama being played out below. Several men in uniform, including at least one general, were watching intently. He wondered if the window would be impervious to the blast of the grenade, or if all the observers would be caught in a lethal shower of glass shards. They didn’t seem personally apprehensive—the lucky sods.

  He was going to have a long talk with his father when he got back.

  “Chevron six encoded,” said the hollow voice. He realized that he’d been hearing Morley hit more symbols, and the wheel spin—the wheel of fortune? What was behind door number one?—without consciously noting it. O’Neill’s lips were thinned with frustration.

  Behind him, close to the entrance to the room, Kinsey could see Bert Samuels, looking more than a little panicked. Although why he should be panicked was beyond Frank Kinsey at the moment. Samuels wasn’t the one with a grenade at his ear.

  “I’m going to take him there,” Morley was saying. “I’ll show him. He’s a hotshot combat reporter, isn’t he? I recognized you, buddy. And God just dropped you in my lap so we could tell the world. You and me.”

  Frank swallowed. “What are we going to tell the world, Major?” he asked.

  “Come see,” Morley said, giggling. “Come see.”

  “Morley!” O’Neill was making one last effort to play by the rules. “Stop! That’s an order!”

  “Ah, stick it in yer ear,” Morley snickered, and reached for another symbol.

  “Wormhole activated!” A cry went up from one of the computer consoles, and a thunderous roar from the giant ring jerked Kinsey’s attention around, even away from the grenade. “SG-9 returning!”

  He had never seen anything like it, never. His reporter’s mind grasped for words, for some way to describe what he was seeing.

  If you took a giant wave off Maui, and funneled it into a cylinder, and whooshed it out of a straw… if you took the geyser Old Glory and set it on its side… you might have an image to work with. It was blue. It wasn’t water.

  It was light, or plasma, or something, and it vomited forth from the ring at the top of the ramp. Then it swooshed back into itself, but he couldn’t see the back wall of the underground room anymore; the plasma stuff had settled into the diameter of the monument like quicksilver covering the surface of a mirror.

  “What the hell?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Things began to happen very, very quickly.

  Morley’s attention too had been yanked to the phenomenon of the Gate, though Kinsey could have sworn the man was disappointed rather than amazed. At the same time, O’Neill made an accurate, if suicidal, lunge at the grenade.

  Before Kinsey could do more than realize what was happening, O’Neill had forced Morley backward against the console, and the armed grenade had fallen from his nerveless hand. Someone else—the blonde?—had leaped in and was applying pin pressure, disarming it again.

  It must be, Kinsey thought, a new-model weapon if they could do that. It should have blown them all to Kingdom Come. Modern technology was a wonderful thing.

  Then he threw up, and his knees finally gave way completely.

  Someone made a noise of utter disgust and pushed him aside.

  Someone else grabbed him and moved him along. As his initial nausea receded, he realized that they weren’t hauling him out of danger so much as shoving him the hell out of the way. He found a handy back wall and staggered against it, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.

  Morley, he was glad to see, was already in restraints.

  The giant circle was occluded with shimmering light, and through it came at least a dozen figures in uniform, as if they’d been tossed through, losing their balance on the steel ramp as often as not, supporting comrades who had obviously been wounded. In response, the room was filling with medic teams, under the fierce efficient direction of the brunette in the white lab coat, who seemed to be everywhere at once.

  He found his jaw opening and closing as he tried to figure out where all these people had come from. Twisting around, he looked up to the observation window. There was the general, no longer watching him but studying the activity in the room below with no surprise but obvious concern.

  The room stank of blood and cordite, echoed with shouts and orders and moans.

  Kinsey tried edging toward the door. Bert Samuels scrambled to his side, as if to establish that he’d been there all along.

  “All right, Samuels, who are these people and what happened to them?” he said, keeping his voice low. A line of gurneys proceeded out of the big room. Without waiting for either reply or permission, Kinsey followed them, keeping out of the way of the medics supporting IV poles and applying pressure bandages. He could hear Samuels sputtering behind him. Evidently someone had thought that a lieutenant colonel as escort counted as “under confinement,” and they were too busy to keep track of one annoying gadfly.

  The gadfly in question shortly found himself in the middle of a very busy emergency clinic. They were well set up to handle mass casualties, he noted, and no one seemed shocked or horrified or surprised. The staff behaved as though it were all in a day’s bloody work.

  So this happened a lot?

  Apparently.

  Keeping back along the wall, out of the way and beneath he hoped, any kind of notice, he focused on what he was seeing and hearing, wishing he had his camera.

  “Ringer’s lactate—”

  “IV stat—”

  “We’ve got a torn artery here—”

  “My God, they’re coming—!”

  Several of the victims were burned, their uniforms smoking and crisped and gaping to reveal bright-red tissue seeping blood. He had seen similar injuries from grenades, from laser burns. There were very few common, ordinary bullet holes.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Samuels babbled, tugging on his sleeve. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.” The colonel was white and sweating, his voice too high and too loud. “Kinsey, come on. We’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “Damn straight you’re not supposed to be in here,” came a growl from behind them. Kinsey glanced over his shoulder to see O’Neill standing with one hand on Samuels’ arm. “When exactly did you lose your mind, Samuels? I suggest you get out of here and report to the brig. It’ll save us all a lot of time.” The tall colonel transferred his glare to Kinsey. “You too,” he ad
ded. “There are people here who need help, and you’re in the way.”

  Kinsey couldn’t help but agree, but there was a story here. Damn, there was a story here! He tried to get a closer look at the casualties.

  He was stopped almost immediately by a giant with a metal tattoo on his forehead.

  “You will come with me,” the giant said.

  “Sure,” he answered helplessly. Why not? Right down the rabbit hole.

  “Okay, General,” Kinsey said a few minutes later, when the dark giant escorted him into the upper observation room. Not, he noted wryly, either Pace or Cassidy; the name tag on the blue uniform identified this man as Hammond, and the deference shown by everyone else in the room placed him at the very top of the hierarchy. Kinsey was not impressed. “Let’s get down to it. What’s the scoop here? What is that thing and where did those troops come from?”

  The general gave him a long, considering stare. All around him other military personnel—staff members—looked uneasily back and forth from the general to the reporter.

  “Mr. Kinsey, all of that information is highly classified. You will not be permitted to publish anything whatsoever about what you’ve seen here today. If you do so, you’ll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I’ll see both you and Samuels”—he pronounced the name with special loathing—“rot in jail for the rest of your lives, in solitary confinement if necessary.”

  “Oh, come now, General. What about the people’s right to know? A little thing called the First Amendment?” The words were blithe and brave, but Kinsey was bluffing, and he hated the feeling.

  “There’s something called overriding national security, as you well know, Mr. Kinsey. And I’d advise you not to push me right now—you’re one inch away from being arrested and thrown into the deepest, darkest hole I can find. And you have no idea just how deep and dark that can be.”

  Kinsey felt his lips skin back from his teeth in what could have been a grimace or a grin. “Threats, General? Now that’s a story all by itself. Just how far are you willing to go to protect your little secrets?”

  There was a sudden stillness in the room, and Kinsey couldn’t quite read the expression that crossed Hammond’s face.

  And for his part, George Hammond could read all too well what was going on in the reporter’s mind. He’d just witnessed the Gate in operation. He’d seen wounded personnel come through what was previously an empty hole, out of nowhere. It was a terrific story, one any reporter would give his eyeteeth to have as an exclusive.

  Behind Kinsey, he could see O’Neill appearing in the doorway, shaking his head. The news about the casualties wasn’t good, then.

  He saw the colonel’s gaze shift to Kinsey, standing unknowing before him, and then back to himself. Hammond met O’Neill’s eyes, seeing the question that haunted the colonel. His conscience was clear; he had nothing to do with the traffic accident that killed the last reporter who’d gotten too close to the Gate.

  It had been a tragedy, of course, but a wonderfully convenient one, and he had felt more than one pang of guilt about his own relief at the man’s death.

  This time, though, no convenient accident could pull their chestnuts out of the fire. Frank Kinsey was the son of a senator who already knew all about the Stargate, and if anything happened to him “all hell broken loose” would be a pale understatement.

  That wouldn’t save the reporter from arrest and trial and conviction, of course, but the secret of the Stargate would be royally blown once and for all.

  Janet Frasier entered the observation room, ready to report on casualties. Hammond shifted gears with something approaching gratitude. “Mr. Kinsey, I’ve got more important things to deal with right now than you. You’re going to be kept in confinement until I decide exactly what to do with you. Now”—he took a deep breath and addressed one of the other officers—“get Bert Samuels up here.”

  Minutes later, a quivering lieutenant colonel stood before him. “S-sir.”

  The rest of the room was absolutely silent.

  No, command was definitely not what it was cracked up to be. Hammond could remember one of his daughters once, in the midst of an impassioned tantrum, calling him a militaristic tyrant who thought he had the power of life and death over everybody around him.

  Looking at Bert Samuels, George Hammond almost wished it was true.

  The little lieutenant colonel stood at absolute attention, oscillating almost visibly between sheer terror and smirking glee. Little tattletale, Hammond thought. Oh, all right, so that wasn’t really fair. Little lickspittle toady. You think your “special relationship” with the Joint Chiefs cuts any ice with me?

  “Mr. Samuels—”

  Several of the assembled military involuntarily swallowed at the softness of Hammond’s tone. Not one of them missed the deliberate omission of rank.

  “—would you mind telling me what on earth possessed you to bring a reporter into this complex?

  “And not just into this complex, but into this facility?”

  “I-I didn’t,” Samuels stammered. “I mean, I brought him into the complex, but that was at the specific request of Senator Kinsey. His father,” Samuels belatedly added, as if it might make a difference. “He, he took matters into his own hands, and then that major grabbed him, and O’Neill—”

  Hammond shifted his gaze to target on the line of sweat on Bert Samuels’ brow. “So, Colonel, you and Senator Kinsey thought it would be a great idea to have his son do an investigative report on Cheyenne Mountain?”

  “It was the senator’s idea,” Samuels said defensively. Reviewing the circumstances seemed to revive the junior officer’s courage. “And this incident is a matter I’m going to have to bring to his attention, sir, since you seem to have a very serious breach of security—”

  “I’ll bring it to the senator’s attention,” Hammond agreed. “And to the President’s. Your role will be specifically mentioned, I assure you.”

  Even now the poor airman standing guard at the elevator was being grilled to within an inch of his life, Hammond knew. Kinsey would never have reached the elevator had Morley not grabbed him. That made no difference now; he would have to find a way to soothe an enraged father, already antagonistic to the whole project, as well as justify the facility’s response to the President.

  “Report, Doctor?”

  Standing at attention beside Samuels and reeking of distaste, Janet Frasier kept her face impassive. “We have Major Morley in restraints,” she summarized. “The personnel from SG-9 are under care. Five are in critical condition. We haven’t been able to get any information from them at this time.”

  Hammond raised a hand. “That’s all right, Captain. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if anything changes on that front. Dismissed.”

  Frasier snapped a salute, executed a parade turn, and marched out.

  Hammond shifted his attention back to the quivering Samuels.

  “You are not to report anything whatsoever to the senator unless and until I specifically authorize it. I have that authority direct from the President of the United States. Are you clear on that, Colonel?”

  Samuels shrank into himself. It was almost a shame to send him away, Hammond thought. It was so interesting to watch the man change colors. He would have liked to watch some more, but he needed to pass along the casualty information first. He could always have a whole series of little talks with the man.

  “Yes, sir,” he gulped.

  No matter how you cut it, it was a gawdawful mess. And he knew who the senator would take it out on.

  Hammond had never been so close to losing his own rank in his long and spotless military career, and that realization was the only thing that was keeping him from flaying Samuels alive.

  He would save that pleasure for later, he promised himself, no matter how this debacle turned out.

  “You’re dismissed, Colonel. I want you to return to house arrest. You are to have no communication with anyone without my personal authorizat
ion. Sergeant, escort the colonel to the holding facility. I’ll be in my office. Notify me immediately of any changes to this situation.”

  “Yes sir,” the attendant multitudes chorused, and Hammond swept out, borne by a wave of absolute fury, not least at himself. He should have realized in the morning’s meeting that Morley was going to snap, should have ordered him to report to Dr. Frasier immediately. She’d been concerned. But no, he’d had to let the boy find his own way, and now—

  He was more concerned about Morley than he was about the reporter, of course. Morley was one of his, and he’d never let something like this happen to one of his men before, even under combat conditions. Hammond sat in the leather chair behind the desk and swiveled around, resting his fingertips on the desk pad and leaning back to organize his thoughts.

  It was a very clean desk, the surface bare of all but the essentials: the desk pad, two telephones, a pen laid neatly to one side.

  The first thing was to call the President and report the incident. He prided himself on using the direct-line red phone very rarely indeed, and then only for major issues.

  “Major” issues. He winced. Well, this certainly qualified.

  And then he’d have to call the senator and tell him what happened.

  Maybe he’d get lucky and the President would tell him to keep a lid on it.

  The odds of that were less than zero. An isolationist administration, intent on placating a powerful senator, wouldn’t dare keep such information to itself.

  And what about his opposite numbers? Would Cassidy and Pace want to know what happened to their famous visitor? He could stonewall them, but the senator would roust their turf too, and there would go his security firewall, shot to hell and gone.

  And maybe that was the whole idea of sending the reporter here in the first place.

  He was going to eviscerate Bert Samuels.

  But first things first. He reached for the red telephone. There was no need to dial a number; only one connection would be made on this line.