Reading Time: 106 Minutes
Title: Fighting for Freedom
Series: Priceless
Series Order: 8
Author: SASundance
Fandom: NCIS, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Criminal Minds
Genre: Crossover, Dimension Travel, Family, Future Fic / Post-Canon, Hurt/Comfort, Science Fiction
Relationship(s): GEN
Content Rating: R
Warnings: Hate Speech, Major Character Death, Slavery, Torture, Violence-Graphic, Violence-Against Children/Child Abuse, Rape/Non-con/Dub-con, Mind control, Character Bashing, Non-consensual Drug Use, Discussion of Vaccine Hesitancy, and the rise of Conspiracy Theories, Discussion of Unethical Medical Research/Experimentation
Author Note: British spellings and grammar conventions. Minor character death, Minor crossovers for Eureka, JAG, Criminal Minds and Leverage
Beta: Aussiefan70
Word Count: 130,000
Summary: Time is running out for Earth to contain a threat of apocalyptic proportions seeking to enslave its entire population by creating a planet of mindless zombies. Despite the gravity of the threat, the Earth and its interplanetary allies have banded together, determined to thwart it, but they encounter resistance from an unexpected quarter, forcing a rejig of a part of their plan. Meanwhile, Homeworld Command’s plan to bring down The Trust once and for all is yielding an impressive amount of raw data when a mysterious Goa’uld disrupts their operation and threatens the life of Tali DiNozzo, in Atlantis.
Artist: Germankitty
Prologue
Athena studied all the latest data from the trust operatives shadowing Ziva David (a former Mossad operative, trained assassin, and the mother of Tali DiNozzo), who was traipsing around the Midwest looking for her daughter. She was supposed to be dead; there had been an explosion and a death certificate issued, stating she’d perished. This was why Anthony DiNozzo had become the sole legal guardian of his daughter, Tali. A child whose existence he had no prior knowledge of, and one that the Trust would very much like to get their hands on. Yet here was the Israeli assassin and mother, very much alive and intent on finding her daughter. Athena was unsure if her motive was to reconcile with Tali’s father and settle down with them both, or to challenge his custody of the child that she dumped on him when she faked her own death four years ago.
Either way, Ziva David, aka Lisa Davies, had a burning desire to locate her daughter Tali, which was a boon to The Trust since they had been unable to get their hands on her. Their Research and Development Department at Farrow-Marshall had ‘come into possession’ of some Ancients’ tech that could be priceless. However, until they had someone to activate it, it was worthless. One of Baal’s first projects had been to offer pathology labs huge financial incentives when techs were conducting routine blood tests on millions of people to be on the lookout for anyone exhibiting the Ancient Technology Activation (ATA) gene and notify Charlotte Mayfield at Fallow-Marshall Industries ASAP.
So far, there had only been a handful of individuals identified; mostly, they turned out to have moderate to weak expressions of the gene, and like those whose ATA gene had been switched on with Dr Beckett’s retrovirus, none were strong enough to activate the Ancients’ technology sitting in a warehouse guarded with a multimillion-dollar security system, utterly worthless until they were switched on. And though one of the handful of gene carriers with the strongest gene that they’d been able to locate through the pathology labs, who were assisting them, finally identified a British man, Roger Bainsford, with an ATA gene that was on par with Evan Lorne and Dr Beckett, he’d flat-out refused to assist them in switching on their tech.
Threats had failed to change his mind, as his only family had been killed in a plane crash not long before, and he was suffering from clinical depression. Roughing him up didn’t work either, since the man was a highly decorated former Royal Marine. Other gene holders, whose gene expression had proved too weak to activate the on-switch on the Ancients’ technology, had been killed and buried in the grounds of the empty Farrow-Marshall warehouse in Virginia. Baal had ordered that they keep Roger Bainsford on ice, however. The Goa’uld System Lord hoped that they could find a lever to use against him. Meanwhile, one of his clones had the brilliant idea that if he were Bainsford’s symbiote, he could override his stubbornness and compel the ex-Royal Marine to switch on the tech. Baal, paranoid that his clone might seize power, contemplated testing the theory himself. But at the last minute, he ordered one of his Goa’uld underlings to take Bainsford as a host instead.
It was extremely fortunate for her boss (and current head of The Trust) that he’d done so, because when he attempted to switch on a healing device (at least they thought it healed DNA), Arbruth and his host, Roger Bainsford, collapsed, screaming in agony and were dead less than a minute later. All attempts to save them, even with the Goa’uld handheld healing device and even a sarcophagus, failed. Baal had been beside himself with rage that their gene holder was dead, and also, Athena surmised, more than a little relieved, that he’d ordered Arbruth to take Bainsford as a host instead of himself. The autopsy revealed Bainsford’s body had been flooded with a substance extremely toxic to Goa’ulds, which in turn precipitated the Goa’ulds to kill the host in self-defence.
Baal, when he finally calmed down enough to think, theorised that the Ancients, though obsessed with ascending, must have encoded a fail-safe mechanism into their activating gene to prevent the Goa’uld from being able to take the Ancients or their human hybrids as hosts to activate the Ancients’ technology. While scientists cautioned that they would need to try again to see if Bainsford was a genetic anomaly or represented a real genetic anti-theft device, Baal had gone postal, pointing out that Bainsford had been the only human they’d managed to locate in 18 months, so should they find someone else with his ATA strength, he was not repeating the disastrous experiment merely to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Applications of the Goa’uld pain stick, as punishment for Bainsford dying, went a long way to making them chary about any further suggestions or failures that might anger Baal, and they’d dropped the matter.
This was why the Trust was so desperate to acquire ‘custody’ of Tali David after they’d discovered the little girl possessed the ‘Ancients’ Technology Activation gene, inherited from her father. The ATA was named by the Tau’ri; those individuals who possessed the strongest expression of the gene could activate and operate most of the complex technology left behind by the Ancients when they Ascended. Such strong expressions were rare; so far, they had learned that General Jack O’Neill, Colonel John Sheppard, and Lieutenant-Colonel Evan Lorne possessed it, and now they’d discovered that Anthony DiNozzo and his daughter Tali had the gene, too.
The consensus at Farrow-Marshall after Baal seemed to have finally been defeated by the To’kra and disappeared was that Tali David could help them to unlock the Ancients’ technology. This would create an untold fortune for the company by selling the devices and breakthroughs, but first, they had to acquire her. Twice, they had nearly captured her, but her father had been able to thwart their attempts, despite it being highly professional. The first time it happened, Charlotte Mayfield ( Athena’s willing host) put their failure down to bad luck, but when the second highly resourced and planned abduction also failed, thwarted by an ex-agent whom the mother of his own child had labelled in a report she had filed years ago as an average agent, Athena was furious. Clearly, their intel, based on a former Mossad officer, was very wrong.
After the second failed attempt to deliver the little five-year-old with the super-strong ATA gene into their custody, she and her father vanished into thin air. Yes, there had been a very public spat between Anthony DiNozzo and his cousin Crispian Paddington in England over an inheritance that ended acrimoniously. There had been a brief press statement by the well-connected and filthy rich Mr Paddington that they had, in the interests of their children, decided to settle out of court. Then there was the terse conclusion stating his cousin, Anthony DiNozzo, would return to the United States and take some time to travel around the country with his daughter before enrolling her in school in the new academic year.
That was the last trace The Trust found of them, apart from a record of them leaving the country and flying into California, where the trail ran cold. Either this DiNozzo guy was extremely lucky, or else the man was extremely savvy. Mayfield had approached Eliot Spencer, whom they had tried to hire to abduct Tali David from the outset, and he’d turned them down, claiming a scheduling issue. Reaching out again, she’d offered the retrieval specialist a fortune to find Tali so her mother could be reunited with her daughter, making it seem like a kidnapping, but he turned her down again.
Now, Athena became more hopeful of tracking down her technology switch, aka Tali DiNozzo, after they learned that Ziva David had not got on a flight to Paris as she claimed, to be reunited with her daughter, as she had told everyone. Instead, she travelled to the Midwest and started actively searching, confirming she hadn’t really been in touch with Tali’s father despite her previous claims. As a former Mossad officer, according to her former Mossad mercenary, she was also a member of Kidon and an accomplished assassin who’d even killed her half-brother, per orders of her father, who’d been Deputy Director of Mossad at the time. Ziva David also excelled at tracking down prey, which The Trust decided to take advantage of. After all, who could be more invested in finding someone hiding out than a mother looking for her child?
So Charlotte had coordinated a large-scale operation to shadow Ziva David as she made her way around small towns in the Midwest. The surveillance team was tasked with alerting local contacts in case they might need to pull in assistance in a hurry to snatch Tali David once her mother found her and Anthony DiNozzo. With a reputation that sounded impressive, Mayfield, now effectively the head of the Trust after Baal’s last clone had been taken down, Athena was growing ever more impatient. It had been nearly one year since their first abortive attempt to acquire her, and all that tech was sitting in the warehouse in Bethesda, Maryland, waiting. While Charlotte’s attention was firmly focused on finding their wayward gene activator, Athena, Mayfield’s Goa’uld, was growing impatient concerning another important matter. Having finally managed to appropriate a working memory device at great cost, time and danger from the detestable Lucian Alliance, to replace the one destroyed by SG-1 when she had abducted Vala Mal Doran, she was firmly focused on having a second go at Vala. Athena remained firmly convinced that Qetesh had left the code to decipher the location of The Key to Infinite Treasure hidden deep within Mal Doran’s memory, and she had every intention of discovering it.
Indeed, it was fair to say that Athena was obsessed with it and was currently searching for Qetesh’s former host, Vala, who, along with Daniel Jackson, had not been seen in quite some time. Normally, The Trust had a steady stream of spies and informants embedded within Stargate Command, NID and the International Oversight Advisory, but suddenly, their information seemed to have dried up. This seemed to come to a head around the time that Homeworld commenced a special project in the Pegasus Galaxy, reported to be the fast-tracking of research into a plant that offered incredible healing properties that involved either a wholesale cure for hundreds of cancer types or a miraculous cure for burns, including electrical burns, and burns from fires, chemical and inhalation burns and possibly even frostbite.
Unfortunately, they had no informants at Homeworld Command, apart from minor ones, such as janitors who had also been weeded out right after they hired Penelope Garcia. Athena had tried to hire the computer genius and hacker extraordinaire, going to exceptional lengths to set up a dummy charity to fool her regarding the nature of the job, before Homeworld snaffled her up when she left the FBI. And the spies they’d embedded at Atlantis had all been transferred back to Cheyenne Mountain, with various ailments that seemed legitimate but also terribly coincidental. The bottom line was that they had no clue what was going on in Atlantis, and Charlotte was beginning to wonder if Mal Doran was there. After all, it was well known that Daniel Jackson, who had twice ascended with the help of Oma Desala and had the contents of Merlin’s knowledge downloaded into his body, was completely obsessed with learning all the secrets of the fabled lost city of the Ancients.
If that were true, and Vala was hanging out on Atlantis, trying to capture the romantic attention of Dr Jackson (which seemed doomed, if rumours over the years were true), then Athena would need to go there or find some means of bringing Qetesh’s old host back to Earth. Knowing her host as she did, Charlotte understood that she would never give up, unless Vala Mal Doran perished, taking the information Athena was certain had been hidden deep in her memory, to her grave.
~o0o~
Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away:
The youngest target of The Trust was blissfully ignorant of the frenzied quest to find and acquire her abilities to override switches on the Ancients’ technology that, conservatively, could probably make them billions of dollars. No wonder Baal and his clones, plus the rest of the Trust, were so desperate to get their hands on Tali DiNozzo once they became aware of her existence. Gaining control over her and her abilities would virtually guarantee obscene wealth and financial control for them and the multinational companies they owned, effectively making The Trust a de facto planetary government. It was incentive enough to find a small girl hidden away and remove any obstacles that got in their way.
While the Goa’uld, Athena and her cohorts were possibly only a few steps away from figuring out that Stargate Command may have become aware of her existence (and her father), in no way were they even close to figuring out that Tali and her dad were hidden away on the Ancients’ flying city of Atlantis, currently situated on New Lantea in the Pegasus Galaxy. This was the planet they had fled to following the disastrous clash with the Assaurans during the fourth year of their colonising the flying city, when they’d lost Dr Elizabeth Weir to the replicator race. Irresponsible as ever, they’d been created by the Ancients before they finally figured out how to Ascend, leaving their out-of-control creation for someone else to deal with, not even leaving behind a warning.
As for Tali’s plight, having a price on her head and two kidnapping attempts by the Trust already under her belt, Jack O’Neill, head of Homeworld Command, swiftly grasped the truth that there literally was no safe place for the child, not on Earth and not anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. Her father, Anthony DiNozzo, had joked to Aaron Hotchner and David Rossi that the Trust had no idea they’d entered Earth’s most secret Witness Protection program, with them heading through the gate and travelling to a different galaxy. Tali DiNozzo, whose WitSec identity was Annabelle Paddington, daughter of Alexander Paddington, illegitimate son of Clive Paddington. As an additional precaution, her age had been altered to make her a year younger than her biological age. Back home on Earth, they had laid a false trail with the help of Homeworld Command that they were still on Earth, specifically in the Midwest of the United States, wandering around, spending some of the inheritance he had gained from the Paddington estate of his mother’s uncle, Clive Paddington.
Right now, Belle was spending time with one of her father’s old workmates from when he worked at the Navy Police place with her Ima before she was born, called Nikki. Nikki, who most people called Nicola here on Atlantis, had come here on the spaceship, Zephyrus, to work for her Aba at the ISBI, which Aba (whom she mostly called Papa these days since they were hiding), from the bad people who wanted to take her away from her Aba, was looking after school today. Her papa and Paula, who was kind of like her Auntie Lavinia but different, were off-world chasing a bad man who was hurting people, and Papa asked Nikki to keep an eye on her.
Although if someone had asked Belle, the five-year-old who was nearly six (she was merely pretending to be one year younger), she would have opined that she should be looking after Nikki. Her dad’s friend was having a baby, and although it seemed like years since she told Tali about Erica, who was named after Nikki’s brother who died, Nikki said that Baby Erica still wasn’t ready to come out yet. Papa joked that she wasn’t fully baked yet.
Tali had given him a stern look (which, unbeknownst to her, always reminded him of her mother) and duly delivered an admonishment for his levity, saying, “Papa, Baby Erica is not a cookie or a loaf of bread. She is a real baby human.”
Having expressed his sincere remorse, albeit tongue-in-cheek, that she was too young to catch, he stated, “Well, while she isn’t a loaf of bread or a cookie, she also isn’t ready to come out and play with you yet, Cookie. You want her to be strong and healthy, don’t you?”
Tali pouted briefly before nodding her head. “Yes, Papa, I just wish that she would hurry up and get done.”
“Not as much as Nikki does, Sweet pea,” he told her, smirking a little.
“Yeah, I bet she can’t wait to cuddle her properly with her arms.” his daughter nodded sagely. Seeing her father’s puzzled look, she explained her logic. “Nikki has been hugging her in her belly ever since Erica’s papa planted her egg, but it’s not the same kind of hugging as Nikki holding her in her arms. She can hug and kiss her properly,” she explained in her typically Tali-ish brook-no-disagreement fashion.
Tony sighed. “I’m sure you’re right, Pumpkin.”
Sometimes, like her mother, it was easier to go along with her, unless it was critical. At the end of the day, he was grateful that she was here with him and not a prisoner in some lab somewhere, being forced to work for The Trust. Plus, on the bright side, while their life had become extremely complicated ever since they discovered their genetic anomalies, he had to say that life was never boring living with Tali DiNozzo, aka Annabelle Paddington, in it.
Chapter 1
Weeks later, the outrageously good-looking male slipped away from the sleeping chamber of the glossy chestnut-haired, voluptuous waitress he’d bedded after rejecting the idea of seducing the fiery brunette he’d felt instantly drawn to. Although sated from his night of sexual activities, taking his leave of his companion, his thoughts were now firmly fixed on the dark, exotic female who’d immediately caught his fancy yesterday. He wanted her in a way that he hadn’t felt drawn to anyone, male or female, in a very, very long time.
As attractive as she was, that wasn’t what attracted him to her…okay, it wasn’t all that captivated him about her. He was transfixed in a way that few of these indigenous creatures had interested him over the millennia he’d spent trapped on this infernal planet, other than as a means of physical gratification. Instantly, he’d sensed a primeval rage in her that ensnared him right away, although he had played it cool. He detected in this one a deep, festering darkness within her; it reminded him of his long-lost consort, Nephthys. They’d been separated by unbreachable time and space after the Chappa ’ai was buried during the Egyptian peasants’ uprising against their Gods (Goa’ulds), when the rest of his kind were forced off the planet and his brethren knowingly left him behind on this Goa’uld-forsaken planet as punishment for his transgressions. He didn’t even know if Nephthys survived after so many millennia had passed, although he hoped she had.
He still mourned their parting after all this time, stranded as he was in this interplanetary backwater which the locals called Earth. Of course, that wasn’t to say he didn’t think fondly of Tawaret and several others he had welcomed to his bed, but Nephthys was different. Not only was she his consort, but she was also his sister. As for the dark-haired, fiery-eyed beauty that captured his attention since he’d first observed her wandering around Brownsville, he felt inexorably drawn to her in a way he hadn’t been for centuries. He thought she might even end up being a suitable concubine for him for a time…maybe something more permanent, if she passed his security checks. He already was far too amused by her air of impatient imperiousness that would make a Goa’uld Queen proud as she tried and failed to question the locals efficiently. It seemed from his rather brief observation that their ambling conversations were far too eccentric for her liking.
Oh yes, he chuckled, she was a definite contender to become his latest concubine after the last one had been taken from him back in Seattle years ago. Belatedly, it occurred to him that perhaps she might like him, be a Goa’uld, hiding out here on Earth, such was her utter arrogance and primal rage that was so very typical of his kind. The only thing that made him doubt her origins was that he was unable to sense the presence of a Goa’uld within her.
After all, it was not impossible – other alien races, as the Tau’ri referred to non-natives in their foolish books and movies (believing them to be made-up), did come to Earth from time to time. Probably checking up on the level of technological development achieved by the inhabitants of this backwater planet. Over the centuries of his entrapment here since his unfortunate situation with his brother/nephew blew up in his face and he was forced into hiding, the Goa’uld System Lord encountered others he could tell were not of this world. He was certain that the insufferable Asgard dropped in to check up on the human population. Not because he encountered them, though, but because of the occasional publicity given to so-called survivors of alien abduction.
The Tau’ri accounts of these abductions, describing the aliens’ appearances, were surprisingly accurate. Most humans laughed the accounts off as coming from the fevered brains of weak-minded humans; however, those accounts were too close to what he knew to be fact for him to brush them off as crazy. Likewise, the crash landing of an alien aircraft in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, along with wild rumours of aliens, duly dubbed by the media as ‘Roswell Greys’ being found on board and autopsied, was seized upon by those who believed in aliens from other planets. Though strongly denied by the United States military, it was too close to genuine Asgardian physiognomy for it to have been a fake. No, the Asgard had been coming here for millennia, but they weren’t the only ones, just the most blatant.
Of course, more recently, there had been Goa’uld System Lords who attacked the Tau’ri in the recent past, starting around the time when the FBI had raided his compound in Washington. He had hoped that the Goa’uld would prevail over the inhabitants of this planet, where he’d been held captive for too long, unable to take his rightful place in the universe. Unfortunately, the Tau’ri, despite their lack of sophistication, had managed to prevail and send his fellow Goa’uld packing. It left him stranded here again. Pining for what was, and just wanting to resume the life that should have been his. Even as he lamented his misfortune in losing his battle with Horus, he intently watched the one who had captured his interest; her sheer unadulterated haughtiness and conviction in her superiority made him hard. The Goa’uld known as ‘Tyson’ adjusted himself discreetly, glad that he had chosen to wear his cream-coloured raw silk tunic and loose trousers, making the effect the fire-brand human was having on him much less obvious.
Tyson reminded himself that he couldn’t be too cautious. Discretion was not just optional. It was the difference between him surviving the unfortunate situation of being trapped on this backward planet without any practical way to get off it. As much as he longed to get to know her, all her nooks and crannies and every delicious curve and plane of her body, with his host’s body most definitely responding enthusiastically to that sensual plan, there were major obstacles in the way of her joining his select little group of followers… er, slaves. Unfortunately, for all her undeniable loveliness and admirable qualities, this particularly sumptuous human host was not without considerable drawbacks as well.
For example, she appeared to have a massive target painted on her back.
Sadly, the Goa’uld who was currently known as Ty, found this chance encounter deeply disturbing on several levels. He’d been trying to keep a really low profile ever since the absolute debacle back in Seattle. As a fugitive hoping to find a way off this planet now that Baal and others had seized control over what was known as The Trust, on one level, Ty was even more cautious. This made him reluctant to become involved with this female, as much as she reminded him of his beloved consort. Still, he must be practical and remember that nearly two decades ago, he had come much too close to being captured. Although it wasn’t the first time disaster had nearly struck, he’d usually slithered out of trouble without too much difficulty. As a God, it had never been too difficult to extricate himself from danger because, thankfully, the indigenous residents weren’t all that bright.
On this last occasion, though, his run-in with authority was far too close for comfort. It had not just involved the typically bumbling Tau’ri law enforcement buffoons who ruled this planet ever since they had managed to put down the Goa’uld rebellion (including himself), in Ancient Egypt. Luckily, over the years, and in every one of the host’s bodies he’d inhabited over all that time while he remained trapped on this forsaken planet, he’d easily stayed a couple of steps ahead of the humans.
Despite his father and siblings entrapping him here as punishment for his wrongdoing against his sibling/nephew, he knew that with patience, he would eventually find a way to escape this primitive planet. In the meantime, he waited patiently…yes, okay, as much as it was inherent in the Goa’uld to be patient…which was to say, not at all.
He lived among these ignorant savages for too long; they were clueless about what was out in the universe beyond their primitive planet. Yet he sensed that was changing. Granted, over the interminable centuries he’d been trapped here, the Tau’ri had slowly (oh so slowly) become more technologically advanced. At the beginning of the 21st century, they were a far cry from the naïve, nomadic desert dwellers of Ancient Egypt. And yet, as technologically competent as they were becoming, until two decades ago, they were utterly ignorant about the two Stargates buried on their planet, which would have unlocked travel for Ty to anywhere in the universe. It was so frustrating!
Nor did these simpletons have any idea whatsoever how many other planets and civilisations existed beyond this blue planet of theirs. They had barely begun to build vessels that could fly men to their moon, and launched an unmanned airship that had landed on the nearest planet to them, a red planet they called Mars after the God of War. Their next triumph saw them patting themselves on the back, swaggering around all cock-a-hoop, boasting about having a manned space station (a truly primitive affair) orbiting around their own planet. As for the flight to the red planet, its atmosphere was incapable of sustaining carbon-based life and was hardly of use, certainly not to the Goa’uld, desperately impatient to get off the planet.
He therefore didn’t hold out much hope that their ability to travel amongst the stars would happen any time soon, which was unfortunate to Ty, so desperate to leave it. But he also knew how to be patient!
There really was no other choice. At the rate humans’ exploration of space was proceeding, the Goa’uld despaired that another millennium might pass him by before it would be feasible to gain control of their space flight technology. Then finally, he could depart this unenlightened backwater and return to the stars from whence he’d come thousands of years before, so full of burning ambitions, wanting to colonise this corner of what the Tau’ri called the Milky Way galaxy.
Then, suddenly, things began to change quite rapidly, based on what he had observed lately, especially with that Halcyon Tower in Seattle built by Baal. Yet the revolutionary changes on the planet had begun long before Baal appeared on television, posing as a business tycoon and well before the time Ty estimated it would take the primitive natives to attain the capability of interstellar travel via ships or the stargates. It happened quite suddenly, and he realised his fellow Goa’uld seemed to have decided to revisit this planet they’d once held dominion over, which left him with a sense of outrage, too. As much as he wanted to escape the planet, he knew it possessed considerable wealth and natural resources. He was incensed at the thought that the reappearance of his brethren could deprive him of his long-awaited chance to live in the wealth and style he deserved while taking over the galaxy.
Yes, that had been part of his quite grandiose plan for the future: to enslave the Earth, but also escape its tyranny of distance from everything else in the galaxy that a System Lord such as himself deserved to rule over. Such dreams helped him corral his ambitions to rule over the T’auri during his centuries trapped here… to wait until his power over them was restored and he could once again express his omnipotence.
Until everything changed, literally overnight.
Once again, as he recalled how close he’d come to losing everything after the fiasco in Seattle, he felt a return of the fierce rage that had beset him for months after the close call that forced him to start again. His fury threatened to overwhelm this relatively new host’s body and to age it prematurely. This was no mere fanciful notion; several of his hosts, seemingly in peak physical condition, suffered strokes or aneurysms following periods where Ty experienced extended bouts of murderous rage. So, he knew he needed to calm the Ne’tu down before his frenzied emotions harmed the frail vessel that was hosting him. Humans were truly unable to stand the strain of strong emotions that Goa’ulds routinely experience… a definite drawback in this physically vulnerable biological lifeform that wasn’t a concern with Unas hosts.
Besides, this human host’s body with his cobalt-blue eyes was one he coveted as soon as he encountered it. Tall, lean yet strong and muscular, stunning features fit for a God, an aquiline nose and a strong jawline, the host possessed a charismatic presence that had females and males alike panting for him to use their bodies. Ty knew immediately, when he saw him, that he wanted it for his permanent host.
Not a temporary host. His forever one!
The Goa’uld race appreciated male and female forms, which was how he’d found himself in his current predicament. His insatiable libido and his attraction to his brother, Horus’ host, had been tolerated, if not exactly approved of, by his fellow Goa’ulds. Demanding from him during sex, Horus gave him some of his seed, which was not permitted. It was forbidden for their race to procreate – only Goa’uld Queens were allowed to bring forth embryonic symbiotes that must be carried in a pouch by Jaffa, not in a biological host. A Goa’uld procreating, mixing both host and Goa’uld DNA in an offspring, would create a human who possessed the racial memories of the Goa’uld, and Ra had decreed that this was far too dangerous and therefore it was forbidden. Seeking his brother’s code of life saw him exiled on this planet.
Still, although procreating was forbidden, he was not opposed to doing a whole lot of bedding male or female humans. With his current host, he rarely had to force his slaves to lie with him, even if he had nish’ta to compel them to do his bidding. Thanks to his current host, though, lo’taurs would often go to extreme lengths to share his bed, fighting amongst themselves for the privilege.
Nish’ta came in handy at times, like when he needed to acquire a human host in a hurry. For example, after the fiasco in his compound in Washington. After barely escaping alive, Ty (or Seth as he was called back then) was forced to take whatever host he could get to ensure his survival. Nish’ta made sure he was never lonely, not even when his temporary host was repugnant, pudgy, balding and old, although his host did own the ranch where Tyson now lived with his lo’taurs.
Ra only knows; it was extremely fortuitous that another of his Goa’uld sons (exiled with his father) had arranged to store a sizable cache of weapons they had stolen before the Goa’uld left the planet, especially a massive supply of nish’ta. Over the years, they’d also acquired a huge stockpile of Tau’ri weapons and funds, including gold and diamonds, and a variety of toxins. With the state a no-go zone, they were very lucky it was all hidden outside Washington State when he was forced to abandon the sanctuary he’d created in Seattle after those damn Tok’ra had shown up unexpectedly.
The cache allowed them to start up again, this time, opting to keep a much lower profile. But Ty would really like to find out how in Ne’tu the Tok’ra knew where they were. They had been here in Wisconsin for close to nineteen years, and most of the locals believed that his last host had sold him the property and moved to Idaho. In fact, the former host, Ed Wittern, was buried in an old mine shaft, along with several other hosts he’d discarded over the last nineteen years after they’d been rejected for various reasons.
The last one was Lyall Hackett, barely eighteen months ago, after he’d caught sight of Tyson Aneau, who’d been passing through town with his vapid but undeniably pretty girlfriend, Courtney Blayne. When she tried to make Tyson leave and continue their road trip to the East Coast, nish’ta soon took care of any ambitions she harboured for fame in New York, settling down to serve him, but he was growing increasingly bored with her narcissistic personality, despite her compensations. And now, having observed the dark-haired, dark-souled human right here in Brownsville, where he usually did his bed-hopping whenever he grew bored with his Lo’taurs, Courtney seemed even more empty-headed and mind-numbingly boring in comparison.
Staring admiringly at his own reflection in the mirror as he got into his truck in the parking lot of the Paradise Inn, he recalled how it had taken considerable guile and patience to entrap his current host, who’d been on the cusp of becoming famous and had been stubbornly focused on seeing his ambition realized after being discovered by a scout from a modelling agency at a rodeo in Iowa. The Goa’uld had accidentally bumped into him at a gas station in a town a few hours’ drive from Brownsville, Wisconsin, on a supply run two years ago, picking up a new generator for the ranch, the old one having been struck by lightning several days earlier. Brownsville didn’t carry them, so he’d been forced to drive several hours south to the larger town of Danners Bend to pick one up, which was where he ran into the spectacularly beautiful Tyson Aneau.
Initially, Aneau had not been keen on the idea of serving his Goa’uld master, not that he immediately understood the full extent of what his service might mean for him. Tyson was filled with great excitement about the prospect of travelling to New York City to receive obscene sums of money and fame, to wear a bunch of clothes and persuade others to wear them too. Honestly, the Goa’uld thought was completely ludicrous, even if he hadn’t wanted to use Ty’s body.
Fortunately, just before the FBI had raided his Seattle compound, Seth, as he was back then, still had a large supply of nish’ta (along with a satisfyingly large supply of Zat’ni’katel weapons and various other indispensable items. He’d had the foresight to divide up and store much of it away from the compound in Seattle, Washington, just a few months before being raided by the federal agents who’d cleaned out his weapons cache, plus stolen away his human lo’taurs, otherwise known as his loyal followers.
The inherent weakness of human hosts would not be so much of a cause for concern if Tyson had the benefit of a sarcophagus to assist him in healing the stresses and strains from what the Tau’ri referred to as high blood pressure. Human hosts here on Earth were seemingly much more prone to this affliction than many other worlds when their veins and arteries occluded, or sometimes even ended up being blown wide open, resulting in a swift and messy death that was traumatic for the symbiote, forced as they were into vacating the host’s body in a hurry. As near as the Goa’uld had been able to figure, it was probably due to the strain caused by the sheer force of their captors’ emotions. Fortunately, human hosts could usually live for centuries if the Goa’uld symbiote retired to their sarcophagus regularly to repair any genetic abnormalities or mutations.
Unfortunately, when he had been forced to disappear after an extremely bloody and acrimonious battle with his brother/nephew over who would rule this kingdom, way back in the times of the Pharaohs, the Goa’uld had been forced to flee for his life after Ra, his father, had sided with Horus. Set (also known as Seth, Sette or in Greek times, Typhon) had, up to that point, taken access to the sarcophagus entirely for granted. Too late, he realised that his life had become far more complicated without access to one. Fortunately, if there was one thing this planet had in abundance, it was human hosts.
Having no access to the regenerative effects of a sarcophagus that could quite literally resurrect the dead, Seth, trapped on Earth, had found himself between a rock and a hard place, as the Tau’ri said. Sure, he could always switch hosts more frequently than the average human lifespan, extended as it was by a Goa’uld god’s own healing ability, but without the sarcophagus, he sometimes had no other option. The fact was, he’d done more body-shifting in the last twenty years than was strictly necessary, and it was inconvenient and bothersome at best. The Goa’uld’s host was a vital component of a symbiote’s identity, given that it was such a big factor in how others reacted to it. Aside from aesthetic considerations, the fact was he’d also grown used to a certain minimum standard of fitness and virility, not to forget aesthetic appeal, without which, even an otherwise perfect host was a deal breaker, as one ex-host used to say.
So, when he ran into Tyson Arneau a couple of years ago, he knew immediately that he must possess his body, and if he screwed the man’s brain out for months before he took possession of him, well, who could blame him. He saw the way everyone else looked at Ty’s body, too, coveting what he had before he joined with him in creating a God of immense power and physical magnificence. It stood to reason that he wanted this host’s body to last for as long as possible. To that end, with no prospect of having a sarcophagus in the foreseeable future, Seth was prepared to do everything he could to preserve Arneau’s body. He’d taken up yoga and Tai Chi, and he swam and arose early every morning to practice meditation. He also bought expensive oils and lotions to keep Ty’s skin soft and wrinkle-free, while his lo’taurs anointed his body and massaged him regularly. It also went without saying that a God without a sarcophagus needed to compensate by having copious numbers of sexual releases a day, so his blood pressure remained stable. Fortunately, there were plenty of humans more than willing to cooperate, just like the waitress from the Brownsville Inn did regularly.
Likewise, looking at the exotic Middle Eastern beauty who reminded him of quite a few concubines he’d collected back when they first landed on this wretched planet, he felt a stab of desire, not just to sleep with the one who was said to go by the name of Lisa Davies. Yes, he longed to know her, to own her, but who were the people who were watching her so closely?
Some were incredibly discreet, while others who trailed around after her were exceptionally obvious. Was it intentional, or were her shadowers just very oblivious?
Plus, there was the question. Why was Lisa Davies being followed?
Seth wondered if she was bait and if he was her prey. Still, it didn’t make any sense. Why would she be trying to trap him, since, to the best of his knowledge, no one knew he was alive? As far as the ATF, the FBI and the other group of soldiers were concerned, Seth Farragough died in the compound’s tunnels trying to flee the scene as the agents freed the members of his group. The twenty-odd male and female Lo’taurs would all swear that it was his body when asked to identify it by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
None of the humans knew that he made it out alive from the tunnel, having swapped hosts with one of his symbiotes, his youngest surviving offspring, who was not only his son but his nephew, as Hathor was his mother and Seth’s sister. Shetek was honoured to switch hosts, although he believed that his father had a foolproof plan to get him away from the FBI, too. A loyal Goa’uld to be sure, but luckily, he was not the sharpest knife on the shelf, because he had willingly agreed to swap hosts when ordered to, believing his father had a plan to extricate him as soon as Seth got to safety.
Although Shetek had been a loyal subject, the switching of their hosts, along with the need to convince the authorities of the tragic death of ‘Seth Fargough’, was absolutely critical to the long-term survival of the stranded System Lord. The Tau’ri needed to believe that Seth was truly gone- not so much the ATF agents, he assessed as being harmless despite managing to infiltrate the tunnels and breach his compound. However, the military contingent was a very different matter, and it included a woman who had once been host to a symbiote; though he mused, the unique resonance of the former symbiote, while faint, was still unmistakable to the god. Later in the tunnel, as he made his escape, Ty detected another human who was host to an active symbiote, but he instantly detected that the symbiote was not a Goa’uld. It bore the unmistakable stench of a To’kra, who were once the brethren of the Goa’uld, but now they were sworn enemies.
The questions remained unanswered, though: What were To’kra doing here among the Tau’ri? Were they aware of the To’kra, or were those foul scum slinking around on Earth right under the primitive Tau’ri noses?
Regardless of whether the To’kra was allied with the humans (perhaps they were looking for hosts, too), why had they been raiding Seth’s armed compound in concert with the Tau’ri federal agents?
Did they know that he was trapped here on Earth? If true, it would be nothing short of a disaster. Thinking rapidly, Seth had understood that the only choice was that Seth must die, or at least he must appear to die. While he was fond of his youngest son (as much as a narcissistic Goa’uld was able to experience positive regard for his youngest offspring), he regretted the loss of his son. If for no other reason than that every single Goa’uld was vital to Seth’s survival on this planet that had been his prison for so long.
And as disturbing as it was to learn that the To’kra appeared to be entrenched here, too, perhaps it heralded in a new age that would see Seth finally able to depart this abysmal planet in the very near future. Unfortunately, Shetek had to die so Seth could survive; there was no other choice. Over the last couple of decades, his difficult decision to sacrifice his son had been vindicated. There had been more than a few battles in the skies above the Earth, no doubt involving System Lords in Goa’uld Mother Ships and Al’kesh attempting to defeat the T’auri. Unfortunately, they failed, but Seth was fairly confident that these humans had found the Stargates. There were even drones from an Ancient’s Chair that defended them against large Goa’uld vessels and destroyed them. There was even one Goa’uld Mothership that Seth sensed was far more powerful than anything he’d encountered before, although granted, more than four millennia had passed since he had been in contact with Goa’uld technology.
Although if he were being brutally frank, Seth was forced to concede that their race wasn’t renowned for its innovativeness. If technological advances were occurring in their spaceships, it was most probable that they’d appropriated those upgrades just as they had with the vast volume of their technology. Still, that was beside the point.
What was relevant was that after having to remain patient for an eon that had crawled by, forced into living here amongst the Ta’uri (the very humans who dared to challenge their Gods and forcefully expel them), a chance seemed on the horizon that would finally allow Seth to leave this planet behind and fulfil his destiny as a System Lord. Only then would Seth return here and enslave every last human and exploit the vast resources and technologies that would make him the most powerful God in the galaxy.
As he glanced at the exotic and magnetic Lisa Davies, there was no denying he wanted to possess her, make her his new consort, but as undeniable as her physical charms were, was a dalliance worth the risk? Was she part of what the T’auri called a honeypot to set him up?
How would they know he was still alive, though? His death had been reported in the media in the days and weeks after he and Sheket swapped hosts. As far as he knew, they thought he’d perished in a violent gunfight between his cult and the federal agents.
Sighing, Seth was torn. Davies’ explosive anger, which he detected close to the surface, her seething darkness, was calling to something deep within him that he had worked hard to suppress since being forced to live here, pretending to be a human. The Goa’uld knew that he should get as far away from the human female as possible; she had a neon sign flashing over her head – KEEP OUT! Still, if he’d known what was good for him, he would never have tried to defeat Horus and look how badly that had turned out for him.
He decided he would observe but not rush in. He was so close to getting himself off this Goa’uld forsaken planet, and he really needed much more information about who Lisa Davies was before acting.
Was she a potential consort, an ally, a threat or simply a foolish dalliance that he couldn’t afford to indulge?
Time would no doubt shed more light on these important questions. After being trapped here for an eternity, Seth, God and System Lord, without an army of loyal Jaffa, needed to remain calm and to proceed with caution and guile.
Chapter 2
When Colonel Paul Davis was alerted that Delilah Fielding-McGee had been poking her nose into the highly secret NatSec operation, dubbed by his boss the Matter of Trust Caper, he didn’t mess around. In his typically efficient fashion, the deputy director of Homeworld Command immediately leapt into action. While he thought the codename was not sober enough to reflect the crucial nature of the mission, Paul knew it could have been a lot worse. Alec Hardison had been egging General O’Neill on regarding the crazy-assed naming of the mission. He was a superb hacker and a fine inventor of technological gadgets. He was also a part-owner of Leverage Inc., a private company consisting of muscle, hacking, and grifters of such a high level of operation that they’d taken down countless rogue corporations and even a corrupt government or two over the years. Alec also had a love of florid titles for Leverage Inc. cases.
Not that Jack O’Neill, Director of ultra-secret Homeworld Command, needed much encouragement to be flippant. The General owned every single episode of the long-running animated show and could quote most of it verbatim, as it appealed to his oddball sense of humour. Still, unlike Leverage’s hacker par excellence, who wanted to name the mission ‘The Always Been a Matter of Trust Caper,’ the General restrained himself… somewhat.
From research into Leverage Inc., which Paul carried out with his inimitable attention to detail, he learned that, like all geniuses, Hardison had just as many flaws as average individuals. His weakness was over-planning, overcomplicating, and, in this case, taking the joke just one step beyond what was prudent. Fortunately, the General, for all his tomfoolery and malicious glee in having people see him as a fool, was a great deal more sagacious than he ever received credit for. It never ceased to amaze Colonel Davis that people still thought the success of the original SG-1 team and his short tenure as head of the SGC at Cheyenne Mountain were due to the undeniable genius of Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson, and the indisputable edge that the formidable Jaffa warrior Teal’c brought to the team with his superhuman strength and physical prowess. People saw O’Neill as a snarky Air Force officer who had just fallen into the job of Director of the uber-secret Homeworld Command, responsible for the security of the entire planet.
Still, none of that mattered at this point. The only thing that mattered was that Homeworld was setting a huge trap to take down The Trust, and much of the credit for that plan was due to the strategic but unorthodox approach of its director. He’d suggested they use the daughter of the former Mossad Director, Ziva David, who was now helping to expose the Stargates’ enemies, albeit unknowingly. Nonetheless, she was currently helping Homeworld Command thanks in no small part to her extreme hubris, walking right into the trap that General O’Neill and the equally wily Anthony DiNozzo had set to ensnare both herself and The Trust in an internecine web.
If it were any regular mother searching for their child, Paul might feel that they owed her a debt of gratitude for her help, even if it was unknowingly provided. However, faking her own death to make her daughter believe she was dead, to convince the people she was stalking, was unconscionable as far as the straight-as-a-die Air Force Colonel was concerned. Of course, having read through her highly confidential jacket had no doubt biased him in his appraisal of her character. He supported DiNozzo in his determination to keep her as far away from Tali as possible, and you didn’t get further out of reach than Atlantis, thankfully, which was now safely back in the Pegasus galaxy.
It was also rotten luck that one of DiNozzo’s former colleagues at NCIS had a wife who worked for the DoD. Even more unluckily, a flurry of unauthorised chatter about the operation had trickled back to Delilah Fielding-McGee. With so many people in intelligence circles involved in the Matter of Trust sting, either directly in surveillance or analysis or indirectly by stepping up to cover for all of the analysts and operatives that were required to run such a massive mission, it wasn’t that surprising she’d caught wind of something going on, just unfortunate.
Davis could only hope that once this mission was complete, The Trust would all be incarcerated in a black hole or some barren planet in a distant corner of space. Supposing they were given an appointment with a firing squad, which would be Paul’s preferred option. Not that it was likely to be left up to the deputy director of Homeworld Command, of course.
He’d also be the first to admit he was biased after the debacle when Ziva managed to pull a fast one back some months ago, when Immigration had been holding her for attempting to enter the country illegally on a passport that wasn’t valid. She used some old contacts at the CIA to help get her released and then disappeared off the radar while O’Neill was on Atlantis. Paul had been mortified when she vanished, and it had been a mad scramble to find her again.
When they finally located her, having returned to NCIS, they’d come up with this complex sting, using the ex-Mossad agent’s obsessive determination to locate Anthony DiNozzo and take back custody of their daughter (despite faking her own death for three years), to draw out The Trust, who wanted to find them too. Their plan involved using Ziva David as bait, who was currently using a fake passport in the name of Lisa Davies. She would help lure out any rogue elements of the NID and The Trust as they followed her around the Midwest United States, believing she could lead them to the child who possessed an ATA gene that enabled her to use the Ancients’ technology, as her gene’s strength was on par with General O’Neill, Colonel Sheppard and her father’s.
While Davis was the first to admit it was a clever plan, it was also a massive logistical nightmare to execute. Each contact and their contacts would also require meticulous mapping, and the logistics of such an undertaking were onerous. The reality was that they probably had just one shot at this, so they had to take down The Trust and any remaining rogue NID agents in one fell swoop. If even a small cell failed to be eradicated, then it was more than likely that the SCG and the DiNozzos would never be free of the shadowy psychopathic group, and that was simply unacceptable.
To that end, Paul, General O’Neill and Anthony DiNozzo plugged every hole in the net, every potential misstep they could think of and came up with multiple workarounds. One of the issues that DiNozzo had identified after so many years as a federal investigator, with contacts across many agencies, including national security analysts, was that such a massive undertaking would generate chatter.
Despite the operation being highly secretive, Tony insisted that there was still a possibility that the MCRT – specifically McGee or his wife, Delilah Fielding-McGee could pick up on the chatter and decide to warn Ziva. Particularly since his old team had reportedly been thrilled to learn that the reports of her demise had been greatly exaggerated. Colonel Davis was frankly shocked that no one seemed pissed off that she’d faked her own death or waited over three years to ask for help instead of coming to them in the first place.
Given their reaction to her reappearance, Paul was as sure as he could be that everyone at the agency would take her side, wanting to help her reunite with her daughter, despite her callously lying to Tali about being dead for longer than the little girl had been alive. As DiNozzo pointed out to Davis and the General, even when she was a newcomer and an outsider who’d helped Ari Hawari target Caitlin Todd and kill her, his former team members embraced her. They’d gleefully gone along with shunning him from a team dinner she organised, her rather obvious attempt at creating dissent in the team she’d been ordered to infiltrate.
Even after all these years, Paul could tell the federal agent’s deliberate exclusion still rankled, but he reckoned that it wasn’t Ziva’s cruelty that hurt DiNozzo most. After all, she was Mossad and had been tasked by her agency with infiltrating their team; her sole purpose was to gather intel. You couldn’t exactly blame her if she had inveigled her way into the federal agency and gained a spot on the team of the agent who died by her half-brother’s sniper rifle. Nor that she strove to undermine the team she served on; it was classic Spy Craft 101, and she was the daughter of a Mossad deputy director after all.
No, Paul was fairly sure what hurt Tony so much more than her excluding him was that his whole team had so willingly gone along with shunning someone who trained them, watched their sixes and would willingly give his life for theirs if required. Nor could those words be considered the usual empty sentiments about giving up his life for them, parroted so freely yet rarely, be tested. During Haswari’s reign of terror, he saved their lives from bullets and bombs, fully prepared to sacrifice his life for theirs, even when he was still recovering from the deadly plague.
The Air Force colonel was truly disgusted that instead of gratitude for saving their lives, they’d joyfully entered into her plan to exclude him, and, so it would appear, were the other agents at the Navy yard, which was how he had learned of the incident. Senior Supervisory Agent Eric ‘Ric’ Balboa, for one, had been scathing in his denunciation of the MCRT treatment of its senior field agent, struggling at the time with the death of a team member on top of his contracting of the bubonic pneumonic plague in a major security lapse, and Paul was in complete agreement. A military team or a law enforcement team, it made no difference. They depended on each other in times of extreme danger, and you didn’t build critical team trust by pulling shit like that.
As a jarhead, no one should have understood that fundamental truth better than Gunnery Sergeant Gibbs, yet according to the report by SSA Balboa, he had caved to pressure from the director. Balboa, though, had filed a complaint with HR, which was part of a larger one, registering his objection to having Ziva David working at the agency on the MCRT. Those objects included that she was a member of a foreign intelligence service, along with the not inconsequential matter of having zero investigative training or knowledge of US laws or the Constitution as it pertained to the justice system and the people of the United States. Unfortunately, his report got buried, first by Jennifer Shepard, the NCIS Director, who ignored every single objection that Balboa and other agents (including DiNozzo) had filed with Human Resources. The head-in-the-sand attitude, having a Mossad agent serve on the MCRT, compromised every case she worked on and potentially having access to top-secret intelligence through espionage and national security cases, was also supported by the current long-serving NCIS director, Leon Vance.
Frankly, the whole shambles with Ms David’s presence at the agency beggared belief as far as Paul was concerned, but what would the Deputy Director of Homeworld Command know? Well, his opinion was that the leadership of that agency needed to be nuked at the earliest opportunity. The corruption stank to high heaven, and he wondered if the rogue elements of the NID also had a foot in Director Vance’s camp? He wouldn’t be all that shocked to learn that was the case.
Anyhow, in trying to anticipate the weaknesses in their plan to use Little Miss Mossad to identify the dirty NID agents and internecine The Trust operatives who were a perpetual thorn in Homeworld’s side, Alex had immediately identified one that had shocked Paul. As the MCRT still retained deep ties with Ziva David, their loyalty in any perceived dispute over Tali’s custody between Tony and Ziva would inevitably side with Gibbs’ de facto daughter versus his parental rights signed by a judge as her lawful guardian, now that she had arisen from the dead.
As much as it pissed off General O’Neill and his faithful 2IC that his former teammates might take sides, both men were forced to concede that it was highly likely chatter could reach the ears of Gibbs, to whom far too many people owed favours. Plus, there was McGee, with his digital finger in a lot of cyber pies in hacking circles, and last, though decidedly not least, was McGee’s wife, a top-rate intelligence analyst working for the Department of Defence. The only reason she hadn’t been co-opted to help out with the A Matter of Trust sting was her loyalty to NCIS and, most importantly, the MCRT’s strong allegiance to Ziva David.
The thought that DiNozzo’s former teammates were likely to help David, potentially blowing the whole sting, endangering a child in witness protection and compromising the Stargate Program, particularly while they were in the middle of an existential crisis with Ambassador Shen, infuriated O’Neill. His suggestion was to gather the lot of them, including Director Vance (who had deep ties to the David family) and sling them all in a dark hole somewhere unpleasant and let them rot. He was beyond playing fair at this point in their fight for the freedom of every single person on the planet. Paul, while secretly agreeing with his superior officer, suggested they could be held incommunicado in one of the abandoned gaols on Balor, where they were already warehousing a steadily growing number of The Trust and AOI spies, who were routinely sent to Atlantis to try to find out what secret project Homeworld Command was undertaking. He even suggested placing them into the suspended animation units at Area 51 and reanimating them after the threat of the Zombie Apocalypse was dealt with, which was a distinct possibility they should consider, which cheered the general up considerably.
Not surprisingly, Tony had objected to all three of their proposals, suggesting that they merely place all three individuals, and possibly Eleanor Bishop, under electronic surveillance to monitor if they were contacted by Ziva or another contact about the sting operation. Initially, he thought they should try to scare them into remaining silent and staying on the sidelines; however, if they chose to get involved, then he agreed they would have to be shipped somewhere for the duration of the operation. Not simply because of Tali’s safety, but it was their last best hope to clean up The Trust and the NID. Plus, they also had to save the planet from the real threat of Shen’s evil mind control, already showing very early signs of being undertaken in a handful of trouble spots around the globe.
Jack had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, but asked, “Why, Bishop? She was never one of David’s contacts and started working at NCIS months after she left.”
“That’s true, but Bish helped McGee hack into the IRS when they wanted to know how I could afford my apartment in Georgetown.” he shrugged nonchalantly, as if it were completely normal conduct from one’s teammates and subordinates. “So, she would probably help Tim if he asked for help…maybe.”
Since it was a similar arrangement to the one that was already in place for Tony’s former colleague, ex-NCIS forensic scientist, Abby Sciuto, who’d been deeply entrenched with the MCRT team before she left at the end of 2019 to work for a charity foundation in the UK, and was potentially in a position to help David gain access to the Paddington family, Homeworld (or MI6) were closely monitoring the Goth, too. Should Abigail Scuito make the slightest move to facilitate contact with Crispian or Lavinia Paddington, she would end up in a shitload of trouble. Tony also recommended they keep an eye on a programmer at NASA who worked with satellites, something which could be done remotely easily enough, so Paul and his boss agreed it couldn’t hurt to play it safe and include the three from the MCRT and Fielding-McGee in their electronic surveillance.
Now, after all their preparation, it looked like their caution had paid off. Someone had been instant messaging with the DoD Intel Analyst, Delilah Fielding McGee, about the ‘A Matter of Trust’ Caper, which, granted, was a huge undertaking that had the agencies abuzz. Not surprisingly, the moment McGee’s spouse started snooping when Ziva David’s presence piqued her curiosity, their security was triggered, and Fielding-McGee was hauled into her superior’s office, their plan ready to swing into place.
The deputy director of the DoD wasted no time pulling his punches; there would be no kid gloves when dealing with the analyst. She would be told to mind her own business and keep her mouth firmly zipped, especially to her husband and his band of arrogant rogue agents who believed that rules and laws didn’t apply to them. They would emphasise that there was no other option; if she didn’t comply, there would be harsh consequences as the world faced a threat far too dire to tiptoe around. Should The Trust ever get its hands on Tali DiNozzo, the consequences could be truly catastrophic for all.
Sighing wearily, Paul Davis reached for his encrypted phone to notify the relevant personnel, who were primed and ready to persuade the DoD intelligence analyst that she needed to stay out of their massive operation to take down the Trust. If they failed to gain her full and unconditional cooperation, Paul was willing and ready to play the bad cop and advise the intel analyst that failure to maintain complete confidentiality (including her husband) would result in immediate detainment, with no right of appeal.
Paul might appear mild-mannered, and that was true up to a point; however, with the future of the planet riding on dismantling The Trust and its sycophants within the NID and, crucially, defeating the shameful plot to turn Earth’s eight billion-odd inhabitants into mindless zombies with zero personal agency, he had no problem being utterly ruthless. Trite it may be, and while Jack O’Neill despised cliches, the incontrovertible truth was that failure was not an option.
~o0o~
After a series of meetings, several over encrypted comms and equipped with a SCIF that made others she’d previously attended look like Tinker Toys by comparison and taking place deep within the secret DoD communications centre. It culminated in the POTUS requesting Delilah’s presence. Already shaken from the pummelling she’d encountered in the previous briefings, although interrogations might be a more accurate description, being escorted by a Colonel Davis (from an unnamed federal agency so secret she wasn’t permitted to know its designation), plus a presidential escort from the Secret Service, she was in panic mode. Her palms were sweaty, and her stomach spasmed with fear at the terrifying realisation of what she’d stumbled into. Not that she was even sure what she’d inadvertently stumbled into, except that it was BIG and definitely injurious to her health, her family and her career prospects.
Honestly, she still wasn’t exactly clear how Ziva David, a former officer of Mossad (and daughter of the late Director, Eli David), not to mention de facto daughter of Jethro Gibbs and her husband’s former teammate, had managed to land Delilah, right in the midst of a major national security operation. Correction, an international operation, since two of Ziva’s former comrades from the feared Kidon division of Israeli intelligence, Officers Liat Tuvia and Malachi Ben Guidon, had joined the encrypted comms discussion. They were apparently Stateside, cooperating with the mission – whatever it was.
Yet somehow Ziva appeared to have placed her family in jeopardy purely due to her tenuous connection with the former NCIS agent who had been believed to be dead until she suddenly turned up alive a few months ago. All Delilah knew about her was what her husband and his team shared.
Of course, she had heard a great many stories about her, but Ziva had already resigned from NCIS and returned home to Israel when she started dating Tim back in the summer of 2013. The three agents had resigned to save Gibbs’ ass. Then the political situation changed, for reasons that didn’t seem entirely clear to her, but probably had a lot to do with Tony DiNozzo and her then-boyfriend Tim nearly being assassinated. Ziva David had remained in Israel and eschewed her old life of spying for a simpler one, she’d claimed. Tony and Tim had explained to her that she had been an assassin for Mossad and was now trying to make amends for the lives she’d taken.
When she learned that Ziva had been Gibbs’ favourite, that he and NCIS had sponsored her to become naturalised and join the agency as a full special agent, despite carrying out acts of espionage against the US when serving as a liaison on the MCRT team. Personally, Delilah was glad the Israeli woman had decided not to return to NCIS. Her actions hadn’t sat right with the intelligence analyst, nor the thought that Tim had worked with a partner who’d been a cold-blooded assassin who committed espionage. Luckily, Delilah kept her doubts about Ziva to herself; it looked like her past had finally caught up with her. Tim was gutted when the Israelis informed NCIS that she was dead, in a bomb explosion and fire at her late father’s olive plantation.
Plus, there was the utterly shocking news that she had left behind a young daughter, whose father was Tony DiNozzo. To say everyone was dumbfounded at the news was no exaggeration, not the least of whom was the child’s father, himself. Apparently, Tony had no idea of either her existence or paternity, and Deliliah felt utter contempt that any mother could be so duplicitous, but also so damned irresponsible not to have made copious plans for her daughter’s custody in her will. It was especially irresponsible when you consider her background as a Kidon spy/assassin, since Ziva David surely must have anticipated that her death was on the cards, given how many people would have wanted retribution for her assassinations. The mother of twins couldn’t fathom how Ziva could have failed to prepare Tony for the very real eventuality that he’d be called upon to assume guardianship of his own flesh and blood at some point.
Delilah was adamant she would never do such a horrible thing to Tim or any man, for that matter, but she also knew better than to express those thoughts out loud after she expressed something similar to Jimmy Palmer’s wife, Bree, and Palmer overheard them. Frankly, she was surprised when he defended Ziva so staunchly, saying that until one was a parent oneself (and at that point, Delilah wasn’t), it was easy to be critical, but they shouldn’t judge her actions because being a parent was a lot harder than it looked. She’d always thought that Jimmy and Tony were close friends and had expected him to take his side, since she couldn’t see any possible reason for Ziva to have hidden Tali’s birth from him.
Abby was another one who had sprung unbidden to Ziva’s defence over keeping Tony in the dark, shifting the blame onto him for being irresponsible. Yet Delilah felt that was grossly unfair, and patently false, as it was undeniable that since he found out about Tali, he’d been the emotional rock the motherless toddler so desperately needed. What she did notice, though, which began not long after he resigned from the agency and his gradual withdrawal from his former team members and friends, was that they’d begun to disparage his character. They criticised his deficiencies as a parent, his selfishness, his emotional immaturity; and the more they found fault with him, the more Delilah began to understand why he’d wanted to get as far away from them all as possible, even Tim.
The only one who had anything positive to say about him was Ellie Bishop, and both women agreed that he’d had damned good reasons to walk away from these people who thought they were better qualified than he was to raise his daughter. It was as if they all felt that since Ziva had been a part of their team for seven years, it gave them the right to have a say in Tony’s daughter’s upbringing. Perhaps they felt he should have remained in DC so they could help to raise her, although from the occasional contact they’d had over the years, he seemed to be doing a great job.
Still, she could tell that Gibbs was displeased that Tony had effectively broken off all contact with them in the past year. Oh, she acknowledged that he’d been good at handling Morgan and Jonny, as babies and toddlers, and everyone always remarked how good he was with kids. Yet Delilah also saw how he treated his agents, not so much as functional adults but as children who must be kept constantly in line.
It was obvious to her that he expected them all to compete against each other to earn his loyalty and affection, forcing the team to constantly vie against each other, which, to Delilah, was the very antithesis of building a cohesive team. Then there was the issue of his patriarchal leadership style, which seemed capricious to Delilah, turning against an agent who’d offered him extraordinary loyalty for reasons that seemed insignificant. Plus, Abby had effectively run out of Dodge for what she wasn’t clear upon, and Abby had refused to be drawn on. Although she had leapt at the chance to leave and go to London in the wake of the death of the MI6 liaison, Clayton Reeve’s violent death, it was Delilah’s private opinion that it had just been a convenient excuse.
Even Tim had expressed his confusion at the coldness that had typified Gibbs’ relationship to the brilliant and eccentric forensic scientist, whose friendship with the Goth went back a long way. He’d once slipped up when he was feeling stressed and missing her, likening her ostracism to what Jethro had done to Tony, before he’d resigned to raise Tali, leaving the country, effectively cutting physical ties with his old team. Now, even emails and occasional phone calls had dried up completely.
So far, Gibbs had been even-handed in his treatment of the twins, but she had made it plain to her husband that he better not try to play the siblings off against each other or play favourites either. If Jethro ever did, she’d kick his ass immediately. Competitiveness was not how she wanted to raise her kids, and at the end of the day, she and Tim were Morgan and Jonny’s parents – he didn’t get a say.
As an outsider looking in on this group of very insular federal agents, who were more than just a team, she was starting to appreciate that Jethro was far from the perfect parent. Moreover, Delilah had been gradually realising why Tony had effectively broken ties with a group of individuals who viewed their supervisor as godlike, infallible and all-knowing. Even if Gibbs were all those things (and he wasn’t), had she been in Tony’s shoes, she’d probably have done the same thing as he did. She had left them all for dust and brought up his daughter without everyone else interfering and throwing in their two cents’ worth all the time.
Of course, when Ziva turned up alive and well after letting her old team (and Tali, not to mention Tony) think she was dead for nearly four frickin’ years, Delilah had been unimpressed. Extremely unimpressed! She was also incredibly pissed off by how blasé Abby, Tim, Gibbs, Ducky and Jimmy acted at her sudden emergence from the grave. Oh, she understood that they were overjoyed to learn she hadn’t died, but Delilah was furious with her toying with her former team members’ emotions, and that the mother let her poor kid think she was dead. Plus, Tony gave up his career and pension because he thought he was all Tali had left in the world. Ziva’s choices struck her as incredibly selfish, and she struggled to make sense of it because becoming a mother made her less self-centred – her twins meant everything to her.
Then there was the unforgivable fact that by faking her death, her grief-stricken former team, believed CIA operative, the odious Trent Kort, had murdered her in cold blood and had almost killed her daughter. In the heat of the moment, they’d closed ranks, tracking him down and taking the law into their own hands, playing judge, jury and executioner. Even knowing he’d previously tried to murder Tony and an innocent civilian on a mission, partly as a warning to an arms dealer whom Kort had recruited, and a former NCIS director who put her own desire for vengeance ahead of her own oath of office, they still killed Kort in cold blood.
For the murder of Ziva that had never happened, Tali, Morgan and Johnny’s daddies could spend the rest of their lives in jail if it were ever investigated. And yeah, she understood how they could have ended up where they had, caught up in unbearable pain and anger, but Ziva David wasn’t actually dead, which meant that Trent Kort didn’t kill her. So, while Tim’s team seemed perfectly willing to overlook how cruelly calculated the staging of Ziva David’s death had been, and the extremely high price it exacted from them all, she never would. Those actions Ziva took had forced them to cross a moral line in the sand, one that would be a permanent stain on their souls.
It was why, even if she’d learnt anything about Ziva getting caught up in the massive security operation currently underway, which piqued her attention and caused a kerfuffle, Delilah would never have mentioned any of it to Tim or the others. After all, Ziva had reportedly told her old team that, after finally taking out her nemesis, Sahir, she was headed back to Paris to reunite with Tony and Tali, who she said had long ago known about her resurrection from the dead. But if so, what was she doing in Wisconsin of all places, sticking her nose into something that had much of the US national security forces on alert instead of with her family in Paris? Something smelled rotten to the DOD analyst, and the very last thing she wanted to do was to pull Tim and the others into another steaming pile of Ziva David’s spying bullshit.
She thought about two of the people whom TPTB had brought in on the encrypted communications earlier that day. Two Israelis with whom she’d worked closely while working in Dubai, not long after she recovered from the explosion at the Conrad Gala by Benham Parsa that left her a paraplegic. Mossad Officers Liat Tuvia and the head of the feared Kidon Unit, Malachi Ben-Gidon, had both nodded gravely to her when they’d been introduced.
“It is good to see you looking so well,” Liat had greeted her.
Malachi had smiled briefly, too, “Congratulations on your marriage and children, Delilah.”
And there it was, subtle but impossible to ignore. They had been asked to join the discussion because everyone thought that, because of her marriage to Tim and through him to the Major Case Response Team, and her contact with Gibbs, she was a security risk. Apparently, all because Ziva stumbled into something way above her security clearance. That was if she was even working for the Israelis, which seemed rather dubious to Delilah. It was also obvious to her that her bosses appeared determined to keep Gibbs’ team out of the loop since it was common knowledge that he saw Ziva as his de facto daughter. It wasn’t exactly a secret that he’d blow shit up for her if she asked him.
Well, that probably explained why she had been deliberately kept out of the loop on this massive op, where normally she would have been in the thick of it. They must have her under strict observation, concerned she’d leak classified intel to Tim or his boss. Frankly, it was a relief to know that she hadn’t been read in because of her imagined ‘connection’ to Ziva David and NCIS and not because of some perceived incompetence or major screwup. On the other hand, it frankly distressed her to think that her bosses felt she posed a security risk because of her relationship with her husband and his NCIS colleagues.
It was also worrying, because if her superiors were aware of the MCRT propensity to go rogue and flaunt rules, regulations, and even, dare she say it, the law, that could spell big trouble for Tim. She was beginning to think their questionable antics (not to mention ethics) on cases were far more common knowledge amongst the higher ups than she’d hoped. Of course, if so, it was concerning to her, not just because it affected Tim and her kids, but it could impact her career. And as much as she loved being Johnny and Morgan’s Mom, she wanted to go as high as she could in the Department of Defence.
She couldn’t help the sharp burst of anger she felt, wondering if her career had already been scuppered due to guilt by association. She wished she could blame it all on Jethro’s cowboy attitude to his job, but honestly, Tim’s illegal hacking had always been a bone of contention between them. He couldn’t understand what her problem was, why she’d frequently been appalled by her husband’s laissez-faire approach to hacking, especially when it was not absolutely necessary. To her mind, anything that wasn’t necessary to catch a terrorist, killer or child abductor could always be obtained by multiple other means without breaking the law or running the risk of setting a criminal free on a technicality.
One night, she’d been so indescribably furious upon hearing Ellie Bishop and Tim laughing about how they’d hacked into the IRS to discover how Tony DiNozzo, their immediate superior, and a friend and their teammate had been able to afford a swanky downtown apartment. How could neither moron be aware of how the infamous American gangster, Al Capone, had finally been taken down by the Internal Revenue Service for tax fraud? Even when the FBI failed repeatedly to indict him for serious crimes that left them the laughingstock of law enforcement departments right across the country. She’d told them both that they were damn lucky that Tony hadn’t reported them, since both would be sitting in the federal penitentiary right now, yet Tim wouldn’t listen to her. Sometimes when they argued about his hacking, Delilah, who was not normally prone to violence, seriously wanted to throttle him.
It was the same arrogance displayed by Gibbs and Ziva, cocky and so damned sure that they wouldn’t get caught breaking the law, or if they were, then they wouldn’t be held accountable. And maybe they were right, both had gotten away with a heap of serious shit, espionage, and in Gibbs case, the DoJ Inspector General’s department had been gunning for him back when she and Tim first began dating. Clearly, Jethro had a lot of influence to be able to slither out of the charges, as did Ziva and murder charges, tracking down Mossad’s Ilan Bodnar and killing him when she’d already been ordered to keep away from him. Tim often reckoned both agents were untouchable as they knew where the bodies were buried, and, honest to God, Delilah didn’t think he was joking. Not even a little bit.
That said, Delilah knew that her husband and Ellie certainly didn’t have the same influence, which would prevent them from facing charges if they continued to commit crimes. Sooner or later, their luck would run out if they didn’t change their ways.
With a sigh of mental exhaustion, Delilah glanced at the clock on the wall in her kitchen, noting that it was still rather early. She decided to make the twins’ favourite meal, her loaded vegetable beef lasagne, for their dinner tonight, since she’d been sent home several hours early by her boss after her stressful meetings. Getting hauled into her boss’s boss’s office and then learning that Ziva was somehow caught up in whatever was going on in the Midwest, which was easily the biggest op since she started at the DoD, had been highly stressful. She’d had to explain that her interest was nothing more than indefatigable nosiness that was either an unfortunate consequence of being an intelligence analyst or was what propelled her into her work in the first place. Still, having to convince them she had no desire to involve herself or her husband in anything Ziva David had found herself involved in was tough. Yet convincing the DOD paled into insignificance with what happened afterwards.
It was clear to Delilah that she’d failed miserably to convince her own people at the DoD that she had no intention or the smallest sliver of interest in discovering what her husband’s teammate was up to, which found the ex-Kidon operative bang smack in the middle of an ultra-classified security mission. So, seemingly to scare the crap out of her, impressing on her all the dire consequences of everything that would befall her if she failed to keep her lips zipped, an additional warning was delivered by none other than POTUS in the Oval Office at the White House. It had been the most extraordinarily stressful quarter of an hour she’d spent in her life, very quickly getting the message that should she breathe a word of what she knew (and seriously, she had no freaking clue what Ziva had gotten herself caught up in, nor did she care), then Delilah’s life would be utterly ruined. But as scary as her presidential meeting was, she took the broad hint and decided henceforth to channel Sergeant Schultz for that sitcom, Hogan’s Heroes.
It was time to put more professional distance between herself and her husband’s workmates. Lord knows, one of the twins’ parents needed to stay out of the federal penitentiary, or worse, some DHS black hole. After Ziva blew into DC, announcing, a la Samuel Clemens, that the news of her death had been greatly exaggerated, and just as swiftly blew back out of their lives after they helped her take down her nemesis, Mira Sahar Azam. Delilah had been feeling pissed off at Ellie Bishop, too. Even before Ellie joined Tim’s team, she had been friendly with the former NSA agent, who, it must be said, was a brilliant analyst, albeit quirky. Although, until she joined NCIS, their relationship had been more of a casual friendship, one that consisted of mutual admiration for each other’s work.
Once Bishop became caught up in Ziva’s web of her Mossad and Kidon secret past, discovering by pure chance that she wasn’t dead as everyone believed, Ellie began keeping secrets and playing stupid, dangerous sp games. Deliliah was pissed at both her and Ziva David, but mostly, she was worried about Bishop, who had become a good friend over the last few years. As her friend, she knew Ellie had been struggling these past few years, firstly, with the failure of her friend’s marriage, which had hit her hard. Then, after the death of her boyfriend Quasim Nasir, she’d become increasingly wild and reckless, and Delilah blamed Ziva for involving Ellie.
So maybe that wasn’t entirely fair of her; Ellie was a big girl; she had free agency. If she wanted to go off with CIA officer Odette Malone, a longstanding associate of Ziva David (who’d known right from the beginning that Ziva was alive and well and playing her stupid spy games while her daughter was traumatised, believing her momma was dead), well, Delilah couldn’t protect Eleanor Bishop from her own bad judgement. But she didn’t have to like it…and she didn’t! Hated the thought of it, and she tried not to worry herself sick.
Feeling the familiar sense of worry and helplessness creep over her, Delilah thought about the two extremely serious Kidon operatives today and their veiled warning for her to stay well out of this mess, which they hinted was of Ziva’s making, and she’d decided she would take the warning seriously. Delilah suddenly recalled another conversation they’d had when they were sharing a dinner at her flat in Dubai after completing a successful mission before her marriage to Tim.
Somehow Ziva’s name came up in conversation, not that Delilah knew much about her, only that she’d killed Ilan Bodnar, who was believed by DHS to have assassinated her father, the former director of Mossad and the NCIS director’s wife, who tragically was also killed as collateral damage. She’d mentioned something about Tim and Ziva, who’d resigned from NCIS and returned to Israel following Colin Parsons’ OIG. It had been a major scandal, albeit in a hush-hush, talk-of-the-watercooler kind of way, and Delilah didn’t get a chance to get to know her. Although, like most people in Washington working at DOD or for the various NatSec agencies, they all knew exactly who she was.
Ziva David was regarded by many in the know as trouble with a capital T. Someone with lots of dangerous connections who’d committed espionage against the US, leaking classified US intel to Mossad, yet she was never charged with a crime. Even more incredible was that NCIS had sponsored her US citizenship, knowing she had deliberately spied on them. There was a lot of criticism that NCIS had still hired her as a full federal agent when she’d gained citizenship status.
After mentioning her name in a benign context, a slightly awkward silence ensued as subordinate and superior Kidon operatives shared a private look. One that lasted long enough for the analyst to feel like the third wheel (and it had nothing to do with her being confined to a wheelchair, either), and everything to do with the highly charged energy in the air between her guests. Eventually, by mutual agreement, Liat spoke; her tone was super casual. Not that Delilah was fooled; her legs mightn’t work anymore, but there was nothing wrong with her brain.
“Deli, don’t take this the wrong way, but take care if Ziva ever reaches out to ask you for a favour. People close to her or her family often have a habit of ending up getting hurt, dead, or their reputations are left in tatters.”
Malachi was thin-lipped and serious as a grave. “Liat is correct, Chaver-Deli,” he said softly, using the name he’d given her a few weeks ago. It was a nickname using a diminutive of her name and the Hebrew word for friend.
“Ziva is driven, impetuous, utterly convinced of her own infallibility, nor will she entertain the possibility that she may be wrong,” he said seriously
“She does not listen to reason and wilfully ignores orders,” Liat told her with a shrug that spoke volumes. “When her father had been the head of the Mossad, she often got away with ignoring her superiors, except when it was her father.”
At the time, Delilah had merely nodded and dismissed the warning. After all, Ziva had resigned from the MCRT and gone home to Israel. Maybe after her father’s death, she felt it was time to return to her roots again, and she wanted to be around her family. Tim had mentioned she had an uncle and an aunt; maybe she had cousins, too.
Now she remembered the warning, the unspoken looks between Tuvia and Malachi and hoped Ellie would not get dragged down into Ziva’s vortex of violence and destruction. Whatever the hell was going on, she decided she wasn’t even the tiniest bit curious; she just hoped the Israeli had the decency to keep Tim and the others well out of whatever the hell it was.
Delilah still couldn’t forget Liat’s face today as they delivered a much blunter warning for her to stay far, far away from Ziva David and contact her superiors immediately if Ziva tried to call her or any of her old MCRT team members (like Tim), ASAP. Liat looked like one of the Greek Furies personified, and this time the DoD analyst was taking the Kidon officer’s word far more seriously.
Chapter 3
The Pegasus Galaxy, in the city of Atlantis:
“Why do I have to do it, Sir?” Lieutenant Colonel Lorne groused, very disgruntled. “It’s disturbing the way their eyes follow me around, and they keep calling me Andy. It creeps me out, so why can’t someone else do it instead?”
Atlantis’ Military Commander, Colonel John Shepperd, having only recently been declared fit to resume his duties, tried to hide his amusement. So, okay, perhaps not all that successfully, judging by his second-in-command’s unimpressed expression, he conceded honestly. And truth to tell, although it wasn’t very colonel-ish of him, it was kinda amusing to see the usually phlegmatic Evan Lorne, his loyal 2IC, so discombobulated.
Shrugging unsympathetically, he retorted. “Hey, not my doing, even. Dr Marten and Dr Fargo specifically asked the General to have you be their pilot and fly them back and forth to Balor. They say they need to commute to Atlantis so that they can consult with PJ.”
“Yeah, I know. I wish they were intrigued by someone other than me, though. Aside from having the ATA gene, there’s nothing special about me,” he complained.
“They keep going on about how you’re nothing like your doppelganger,” John volunteered, sounding mystified.
“Yeah, I know. And that’s not creepy…MUCH!”
After John laughed at him, not really understanding what Lorne’s problem was because Dr Martens seemed cute, for a …well, he wasn’t too sure what Holly was. And Douglas Fargo kinda reminded him of Rodney. Arrogant, awkward, completely lacking in social skills, but a softer, less abrasive version of Atlantis’ Chief Science Officer – although Rodney was still on medical leave and his little sister Jeannie was filling in as CSO.
His second in command shot him a peeved look. Possibly, he’d been hoping for a more sympathetic reaction before a calculating look passed over his usually good-natured face.
“Maybe you’d like a nice flight in a puddle jumper, Colonel? It’s so pretty out there on Balara at this time of year, he said in an uncharacteristically wheedling tone of voice.
“Ah…I’m not sure if I’m ready to go back there,” he confessed, his teasing mien suddenly pensive.
“Ah fuck, Colonel,” Lorne swore. “My apologies! I’d forgotten that you haven’t been back there since the…er recovery,” he said awkwardly, remembering the state the Commander had been in when he was found with the rogue group of Genii. “Sorry, that was insensitive.”
“Don’t be. Honestly, I’m so relieved that people are finally letting me move on from the abduction. Frankly, it’s damn embarrassing to be constantly treated with kid gloves,” he admitted with a sigh.
“People are just relieved to have you back again, good as new,” he said honestly. “A lot of people thought after so much time missing, you were dead. They only want to show you that you were missed,” he reminded his commander gently.
Yeah, I know,” Sheppard said, feeling suddenly like he was acting like a dick.
He recognised that Atlantis and her inhabitants had been traumatised by his absence. He remembered a conversation he’d had with his psychologist, Dr Aoife O’Shea, saying that his months-long disappearance had a deep impact on the whole station, and it would take time for everybody to regain their equilibrium, including the sentient city herself. Not to return to normal, because too much had changed while he was gone, but for the base to find itself a new normal. And right now, they were all still finding their feet.
Lorne sighed long-sufferingly, and John manfully managed to quell his grin, trying hard not to act like a jerk.
“Right, so I guess there’s no getting out of this,” he said regretfully.
“Flying Drs Marten and Fargo to Balar? Well, General O’Neill personally requested I spare you,” John mused. “I thought you were trying to stay on his good side,” he pointed out with an evil smirk.
It had to be the worst-kept secret on the giant floating city that Lorne had lived here without having any romantic or even sexual liaisons. Either that, or he and his partner/s had been extraordinarily discreet until now. But now he’d fallen hard and fast for the pretty blonde teacher, who also just happened to be General Jack O’Neill’s adopted alien daughter, Cassandra Frasier.
Not only was the general protective of the winsome educator, but she had come to Atlantis to heal a shattered heart after her fiancé cheated on her and left her heartbroken. Which meant that when the general learned that Cassie was seeing someone, but no one would tell him who she was dating, he embarked upon a so-far fruitless search for the person who thought they were good enough to date her…and therefore also interact with his granddaughter, Sarah O’Neill, whom Cassie adopted.
Lorne rolled his eyes. “Ugh, good point, Sir. I can’t believe he hasn’t realised we are dating yet, but as soon as he does, he’ll probably ship me back to the SGC, or if he’s super pissed off with me, assign me to Area 51,” he said dolefully.
John wasn’t nearly as pessimistic. Evan was a nice guy, an exceptional officer and had done a damn fine job as Atlantis’ military commander in his absence for nearly nine months. Sheppard was incredibly grateful for his steady support as he began the long, slow process of recovery and dealing with his PTSD. He’d fight tooth and nail to keep his XO on the base, and more to the point, he reckoned that Lorne would never do anything to hurt their junior schoolteacher. Everyone, students and Atlantis residents alike, loved her and realised what a gem they had. Even their artificial intelligence…um, entity was more than a little in love with her, plus a few guys he knew who batted for the other team. General O’Neill would be a complete jackass if he chased a genuinely good guy and officer like the lieutenant colonel away, and more to the point, John reckoned that Cassie would kick his ass if he tried.
Feeling like he’d been a bit of an asshole to his 2IC, John grinned at the poor guy, encouragingly. “Keep your chin up, buddy. I doubt it will come to that. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt to stay in the General’s good books,” he said, exhorted him briskly.
Despite Lorne’s nod of agreement, John noted his grimace as he said, “No, you’re right, Sir. Pay no notice to me.”
So, John would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the most intuitive person – hell knows his former wife Nancy would certainly agree with him, but even he could see that Lorne was still unhappy. And as his friend and colleague wasn’t one to shirk a confrontation, whether it be Goa’ulds, Genii or the creepy as fuck Wraiths, he did have to wonder what exactly had the guy so damn spooked. It wasn’t like him.
“So, tell me again why you find them creepy?”
Lorne gave him a helpless look. “I don’t know. They’re always calling me Andy,” he said. “They reckon I’m a dead ringer for their former sheriff, who was blown up or something, and Dr Fargo rebuilt the new one as a robot. They say the resemblance is uncanny…physically.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He honestly didn’t get why it should bother Lorne so much. The guy had nerves of steel.
“Apparently,” Evan said, using finger quotes to express his derision, “Andy has much more personality than I do. According to Dougie, I’m more of a robot than the android,” he said with a grimace, trying to make light of it. “Maybe General O’Neill is right; Cassie could do better than me.”
“Don’t be a jackass. She likes you and, from what she’s told the other ladies in the family wing, her fiancé was as extroverted as they come. A party type, who proceeded to cheat on her, so I think she is attracted to someone who is less flamboyant and is more serious,” he reasoned.
Sheppard still wasn’t clear about what Lorne’s issue was, though.
Lorne threw him a grateful look before flinging him a bone that made things much clearer. “Yeah, the General mentioned Cassie’s ex was a real piece of work.”
“How did that come about?” John asked, choking back laughter.
“When he was interrogating me, trying to find out who she was seeing,” Evan admitted, looking uncomfortable and just a tad mischievous.
“Drs Marten and Fargo think that based on his ability to ‘engage’ with people in a non-threatening way, that a bunch of Andys might be a way to help administer the Zombie vaccine to large groups of people, either by regular injection or something like when Hathor managed to gain control over all the male personnel on the SGC back in the third year after the program became operational.”
Oh yeah, Sheppard knew all about that foothold situation in the early days of the program, largely because he had been attending a support group for male sexual assault survivors. It was being coordinated by one of the new psychologists, Dr Umwali Nkusi, who General O’Neill had assigned to Atlantis some months ago, a world-renowned expert in the areas of sexual assault and torture. She also led the support group for female sexual assault survivors in Atlantis, as well as another support group for the Pegasus galaxy victims of the monstrous sexual predator, Lucius Lavin. The Pegasus group, including the former Winyan-surviving victims and now proud Athosians after Teyla people readily offered them refuge, had continued to grow. Even after he had been brought to justice, victims who had remained silent were still coming forward, and Dr Nkusi was flat out training and mentoring group leaders to lead their own support groups in the not-too-distant future.
However, the point was that Dr Daniel Jackson began attending the same group as John and learned that Daniel had been raped while under the influence of Hathor’s Breath of Hathor because she had wanted to create a pack of infant larvae who shared both Goa’uld and human DNA. This would allow for the creation of human Jaffa who would incubate the infant Goa’uld until mature enough to take on a human host. As horrific as that nonconsensual assault had been, that wasn’t all.
It got worse! Daniel’s Abydonian wife, Sha’re, was abducted by the System Lord Apophis and then chosen by his Queen Consort, Amonet, as a host. Aophis forced Sha’re to bear him a Harcesis (a child who was born of two Goa’uld hosts), a human child who possessed the genetic memories of its Goa’uld parentage and therefore forbidden to exist by Ra since its very existence posed a massive threat to the Goa’uld race. The Harcesis child that Apophis sired, he’d intended would become his new host when it was old enough. Fortunately, Oma Desala, an Ascended Ancient with a penchant for interfering (even though it was forbidden), gained custody of Shifu, saving him from that terrible fate.
Thinking about what Lorne said about using hundreds of Andys to inoculate Earth’s population, John found his thoughts turning to the millions, the billions of people on Earth who would be infected should Shen’s evil plan come to fruition. Feeling ill at the thought, John realised once more just how badly he and Elizabeth had messed up over the Lucius Lavin fiasco. Now, everyone back home on Earth was facing domination and slavery due to the drug that the monster had discovered, which the scientists were now calling MCD–238β. Alex Paddington, the head of the Interstellar Bureau of Investigation, on the other hand, somewhat flippantly called it the Happy Zombie Drug, which drove the scientists crazy, but John reckoned that was his goal.
John had noted, as he resumed more of his duties, gradually regaining his balance in the rapidly changing Atlantis, that the Associate Director of the burgeoning ISBI had a strong sense of the ridiculous. It was greatly appreciated since it helped keep people’s mood buoyant when things seemed dire. The military commander also appreciated Alex’s people skills, along with movie nights he organised, especially the comedy movies that helped boost morale in Atlantis enormously. He couldn’t believe how many people he had converted into cult fans of The Princess Bride, including himself, who expected a lame fairytale for kids. Even Ronon was a fan!
Smiling half-heartedly, Lorne stood up and excused himself. “With your permission, sir, I need to get ready to fly those scientists to Balar” he said, referring to Fargo and Martens on secondment from DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), where they were working on vaccine dispersal methods.
Dismissing his XO with a “Chin up, Lorne,” he watched the normally implacable officer depart, looking as if he was about to encounter a Wraith.
With a sigh, John admitted he couldn’t entirely blame him. Maybe if he hadn’t been read in on Holly Marten’s background, he might feel differently. But just as he’d experience a sense of extreme discomfiture when Elizabeth Weir’s disembodied consciousness finagled her way onto Atlantis to ‘obtain’ a 3-D body to house her consciousness, she was still not a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood human, and maybe he was biased, but to John, she was not the real Elizabeth Weir.
If Lorne wasn’t comfortable with the Sheriff Andy look-alike androids running around on the base, John could hardly blame him. He’d probably feel the same way. As guilty as he felt when Elizabeth agreed to lead the other Assurans into deep space, where their newly embodied consciousness would freeze up rather than be free to roam around the galaxy, he’d also felt extremely relieved.
Which reminded him, now that he was medically and psychologically cleared (with the proviso that he continued receiving regular psychological supervision for his PTSD), it was time to ramp up the search for Elizabeth and her little band of Asuran groupies, obsessed with Ascension, who’d threatened to destroy Atlantis to regain ‘bodies’ once more. There had been a couple of attempts to check on them, but so far, they hadn’t found them floating around like frozen popsicles, as expected.
While most of their scientists in Atlantis had felt that the Asdurans didn’t pose an immediate threat, it had been decided that it should be a priority for Atlantis scientists to take up the slack, since Dr Lee had been interrupted in his creation of a virtual world that could permanently house Elizabeth and her followers. Bill Lee’s focus was currently on overseeing the MCD–238β vaccine and thwarting Ambassador Shen’s plan to enslave some 8 billion inhabitants of Earth, should it play out as it had in Paula Muir’s alternate reality, and crown herself as the Emperor of Earth. Which was as it should be, of course.
Still, the last thing they needed was Elizabeth and her followers turning up in the middle of trying to thwart Shen’s horrific plans for the planet. Jeannie McKay, still the temporary acting Chief Scientist as General O’Neill refused to allow Rodney to regain his position yet, had suggested that her brother take over the responsibility for finishing off the virtual reality world. Then they would confine the Asurans as a permanent solution that didn’t risk some do-gooder space traveller coming across them in the future and deciding to unfreeze them, thinking they were helping. So, Rodney, along with Radek Zelenka, who’d been assigned as McKay’s keeper, was hard at it, trying to finish off the VR world as quickly as possible to ensure everyone’s safety.
Sure, it wasn’t a perfect solution. Sheppard regretted that Elizabeth would be sentenced to eternity, believing she would one day achieve her ambition to Ascend, but what was the alternative? Even Weir had conceded in a moment of intensely painful clarity that she and the others were too dangerous. That they were too damn unstable to believe they wouldn’t pose a threat to carbon-based life forms in the Pegasus or Milky Way galaxies at some point in the future.
John vowed to get a proper systemic search underway for the Asdurans, even if the VR prison still had a way to go before it was deemed escape-proof. Because in his experience, something else was likely to blow up in their faces just before the virtual reality project was completed. It always did, and he had no intention of it happening while they had the kids from the alternate reality and the teachers and psychologists busting a gut helping them to settle in as they transition from the three groups into individual foster families. The very last thing any of those poor kids needed were the Asduran’s deciding to drop by for a visit.
Somehow, Sheppard didn’t think they’d be too amused at the sting that was played on them the last time they saw them, either. No one appreciated being turned into a popsicle and left bobbing around in space! At least five years ago, when they’d dropped in unannounced, there had been no kids on Atlantis. Toran John, his namesake and Teyla’s son, had been on New Athos with his father, and Monique and Miko were back on Earth for their babies’ births.
But now, including the Alt-Reality kids and the offspring of the Athosians who’d been recruited as guides, botanists and indigenous medics, almost fifty-five children were living on the floating city. And Nicola Bates was expecting a baby in the next few weeks; their population of minors was steadily growing, and John didn’t want Elizabeth Weir or her Asuran Ascension groupies anywhere near these vulnerable mini people.
If they got lucky and located their frozen Assurans before Rodney and Radek completed the Virtual Reality computer simulation and ran it through the robust quality assurance checks they’d all inevitably insist on before imprisoning them in it, they’d come up with a temporary way to contain them. The most obvious one John could see was Atlantis’ cryogenic pods, where Clone Carson spent months while Dr Keller had figured out how to stabilise him without the crap that the Wraith Michael had been pumping into him. Even if it took a while, they knew that Old Dr Weir from an alternate timeline had spent ten thousand years swapping the three zero-point modules to keep Atlantis afloat after the Ancients abandoned her.
So, John decided to bring up his plan at the weekly governance meeting tomorrow, so they could go on the offensive and hunt down Elizabeth and her cohorts. Seriously, what had they been thinking when they’d decided to dump them out into space like pesky trash that they couldn’t be bothered to dispose of properly, some five years before? It would be his first governance meeting since being cleared to resume full duties as Atlantis’ military commander, and somehow it felt fitting, albeit uncomfortable, to seek consensus to act proactively before the Asuran replicators caused another preventable problem.
John understood that they should have dealt with it properly back then; however, that was easy to say now. Sentimentality over Elizabeth Weir being one of the Asurans had certainly stymied the pragmatic and responsible choice that should have been made, yet they’d hesitated. It was their loyalty to her (as the first leader of the original Atlantis mission to the Pegasus galaxy) that made them waver over destroying her and the other Asurans. While loyalty and sentimentality were hallmarks of what made them human, he admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that troubling information about Weir’s motivations and her obsessions had come to light, and had they known about them then, it might have changed the choices they made. Yet, even five years ago, when she was forced to admit that she had tricked the Lanteans into giving them new corporeal bodies by endangering everyone on Atlantis, the signs were there.
When you consider some of the other decisions she made, and Lucius Lavin and his herbal zombie concoction must surely rate up there with the most egregious of miscalculations, they really should have dealt with the final threat from the Asuran replicators back then, and he knew he and Richard Woolsey must take the majority of the responsibility for shirking the hard choices that came with command.
Now it was past time to step up and make the hard decisions – one person, who didn’t really exist anymore, could not stand in the way of ridding them of the threat that the Asurans, whom the Ancients wiped their hands of millennia ago, had left behind for someone else to clean up. Sheppard, having been super-critical of the lack of responsibility shown by Ancients to the peoples of Pegasus as they headed out the door, so to speak, had no intention of repeating their mistakes. He just needed to remind himself that the Elizabeth he considered a friend was no more; she’d died back on Asuras all those years ago.
Feeling melancholy, he reminded himself that no leader was more important than the people they led. He had been willing to give up his life to save others; he’d done so on more than one occasion, so he must also be prepared to save humanity from the threat that Elizabeth Weir posed if she was to be re-enervated again. It was true that the burden of leadership rode heavily upon his shoulders at times, but needs must!
As he stood up, headed out for his first real workout with Teyla since he’d been cleared for field duties, he knew she wouldn’t go easy on him. He would be feeling it tomorrow, and yet he was also chafing at the bit to get back to full-field fitness; he wasn’t going to enjoy the process of getting there, however. Once again, he mentally thanked Atlantis for the swimming pool she’d created after Alex had mentioned swimming would be good therapy for his injuries (PTSD and physical) and for Monique. He sent the sentient being whose body had been used to create this wondrous ship a mental thank-you.
Although he had the ATA gene in one of the strongest manifestations, Sheppard was also one of a select few who knew Alex had a second Ancients’ gene that gave him proficiency in communicating with her. While able to understand her archaic form of Alteran, Paddington had begun communicating with her via mental pictures, and she had reciprocated with him and increasingly with John. In fact, sometimes he wondered if the Ancient was reading his mind because she replied with a mental picture of a hot tub and sauna she was constructing in a structure adjacent to the swimming pool. Apparently, Alex thought it might be useful, so Atlantis provided, happy to keep the offspring of her people happy.
As he made his way to meet his doom, John felt very happy that soon he would be able to indulge in recovery sessions in the hot tub after his Athosian teammate kicked his ass with the bantos and made him cry.
Belle was becoming even more impatient for Erica Leigh to put in an appearance. Every time she encountered Nikki, she would greet her with an enthusiastic hug and then hug Nikola’s belly, explaining she was hugging Erica too but from the outside. Then after greeting both Bates, she would then inquire if today was going to be the day of Erica’s Birth-Day?
Usually, the ISBI intel analyst would reply negatively, but in the last few days, Nikki would shake her head and say, “I’m not really sure. I don’t think so.”
Today, she was looking after Belle as Alex and Paula were off-world and Nikki had picked her up after school. After their hugging ritual, Belle when Erica would arrive, Nikola gave the little girl her customary response. “I’m not really sure, Belle. Maybe soon.”
Staring at her friend, she interrogated her, “Have you had any branch-hits today?” referring to Nikki’s Braxton-Hicks contractions that had caused a lot of excitement in the five-year-old when they first occurred, thinking that Erica’s arrival was imminent, only to be sorely disappointed.
When Nikki answered, she had some a couple of hours ago, Belle decided that Erica was not likely to put in an appearance today. Seeing the woebegone expression on Belle’s face, she took pity on her charge with a sure-fire remedy.
“I could use a smoothie. What about you?”
“A shake, and can I have some cake?” Belle all but squealed enthusiastically.
Chuckling, Nikki told her, “General Jack has taught you bad habits, poppet. Maybe a small piece,” she said, figuring it couldn’t hurt this once, even if she knew Alex usually gave her fruit.
“I miss Uncle Jack,” Belle said wistfully. “When will he come back to Atlantis?”
“I’m not sure, but he’s very busy at the moment. And if we are going to eat cake, then we should get going now so we don’t spoil your appetite for dinner,” Nikki said.
“Okey-dokey,” Belle parroted excitedly, having picked that expression up from Jack Hotchner. “Let’s go!”
“Wait, Belle, can you help me put my shoes on, please?” she asked, having kicked them off when she’d gotten back to her apartment.
After explaining that she was getting so big with Erica now that regular things like putting on shoes were too hard, Belle rushed to help. As they left the apartment that opened onto the communal room for kids and parents to socialise, she chattered away animatedly about what they’d learnt at school that day.
Still, Nikki was not ready for the little girl’s prescription to encourage Erica to make her long-awaited arrival.
She’d told her casually, “Maybe you should start eating spicy food or ask the cook to make you some Turkish Delight to eat every afternoon. Why does Turkish Delight make a baby hurry up and come, Nikki? I asked Joshie, and he got all red in the face and told me to ask Papa, but I forgot.”
Nikki mentally sympathised with the embarrassment of the almost thirteen-year-old son of Paula (and Belle’s sort of cousin). Nikki wondered who had been gossiping inappropriately in front of the very smart five-year-old while trying to figure out how to answer her question. Umwali Nkusi, one of Atlantis’ three psychologists and Nikki’s bunkmate on board their three-week flight to Atlantis, joined them. Her first friend on Atlantis (if she didn’t count Alex, who she already knew), Umwali, was desperately looking for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria after a particularly tough counselling session, and Nikola was saved from having to figure out what to tell her young charge.
Life was certainly not boring when Belle Paddington was around; she concluded with a chuckle that had the misfortune to make her pee!
~o0o~
Just as Tali DiNozzo didn’t have any idea about the incredible depths of the search that The Trust was involved in to locate her and separate her from her father, nor did she have any clue about her mother, Ziva David, who was alive and searching for her, too. Ziva was unknowingly helping to keep The Trust occupied, chasing after the deliberately false trail left by her Uncle Jack, while acting as a bird dog, flushing out the Trust operatives. All the bad guys were desperate to earn the spectacular bonus that the CEO of Farrow-Marshall had promised for locating Tali. Indeed, Tali or Belle, as she was known on Atlantis, believed that her Ima, whose picture was in pride of place in her new bedroom in Atlantis, was dead. As far as she knew, her mother had died protecting Tali, and then, when she was two, her father had swooped in to care for her, even though he had lived far away from Israel. Now, even after Tony had unequivocal proof that Tali’s mother was alive and had deliberately faked her death to go on a hunt for the person who was trying to kill her, he hadn’t shared that information with his daughter, nor did he have any plans to, either.
He had his reasons. Some reasons that would probably seem petty to a lot of people who did not know the whys and wherefores of how Tali was conceived, and he didn’t particularly care. However, the most important reason was directly related to why they were here; the Trust were out to get Tali, in any way they could, and would use Ziva to achieve those ends without blinking an eyelid. Pragmatically, if they ever got their hand on his daughter, they stood to make an obscene amount of money from her abilities to override security switches on alien technology that was light-years beyond anything Earth could produce. The Ancients built Atlantis and built the whole Star Gate system that allowed you to travel to other planets in other galaxies.
So, it stood to reason that their technology would be equally impressive. Although, frankly, Tony often felt overwhelming anger at the builders of their home. If the Ancients (the Ancestors, as they were known here in the Pegasus galaxy) had been more responsible as they were heading out the door on their way to their damned higher plain of existence and blown up their tech so that other more primitive races could find it, Tali would never have had this massive target on her back. Yet the reality was that she did have that target, and he would do anything to protect her. If that meant that ultimately, he needed to burn their real identities and fake their deaths to ensure that Tali could live out the rest of her life unfettered by the constant threat of abduction and slavery, then so be it.
Whatever it took to give her as normal a life as possible, Tony was willing to consider. After all, she had never asked to be born. And now there were also Josh and Mikelle, his alt kids from a different reality who had sought refuge in this world with their mother, Paula, and who had both inherited the Ancients’ genes, too. Not just the ATA gene, but one of the extra ones that Chaya Sar had informed them about, as Tali had.
So, at this stage of the game, he was not going to angst about being a hypocrite if it was necessary to fake his and Tali’s death from Ziva and the world, since this was literally the life and death of his child…and his alt kids too. He and Paula had already agreed to become legal guardians for the trio, so if anything happened to either of them, they would assume guardianship of the three kids.
At some point, he would need to explore who should gain custody of Tali, Josh and Mikelle if he and Paula were both dead, but that would be a project for a later date. Luckily, he had two highly skilled legal minds in A.J. Chegwidden and Aaron Hotchner to consult with. Hotch had already drawn up an adoption contract for little Kelvin Austen-McKay for Jeannie and Kaleb Miller.
Notes:
Ra
One of the most powerful and influential of the Goa’uld System Lords, who was responsible for finding humans on Earth. Ra discovered the Goa’uld could use them as hosts, maintaining their bodies indefinitely with their advanced technology. Ra stumbled upon the planet Earth thousands of years ago.
Chapter 4
Jack O’Neill stepped out of the subcommittee meeting, his thoughts and emotions chaotic. They were meeting here at Cheyenne Mountain, on level 22 of NORAD (for ease of access), to figure out how to administer the MCD –238β vaccine. The seemingly impossible bit was to do it without Ambassador Shen and her associates (who may or may not include the Chinese government), learning that her evil plan to reduce Earth’s population to mindless slaves was known. It was a gigantic task to administer the MCD–238β vaccine to the entire population, let alone do it without alerting their foes, and now that they had more than eight billion doses ready to go, it was time to coordinate and plan how to administer it in secret.
The massive logistical task facing them was one migraine-inducing headache they had no choice but to overcome, and now, at the eleventh hour, they’d hit a roadblock in the shape of a committee of politicians who’d decided to make an already incredibly delicate and ultra-classified task practically impossible. Never one to have much time for bureaucracy or those who imposed it on them, Jack sometimes wondered whether politicians were really as dumb as they appeared, especially today, when they turned an extremely difficult and massive mission into one that seemed practically insurmountable. And his bosses, the Joint Chiefs and his Commander-in-Chief, all told him to make it work; that they were counting on Homeworld to save the whole freaking planet, despite the massive obstacle they’d shoved in his way.
The issue was that their vaccination program needed to be executed on the DL, preventing Ambassador Shen (and her government) from finding out that the jig was up; Homeworld Command were onto their foul plan.
And didn’t that sound like a really bad cliché straight out of a Sci-Fi plot, from a movie that bombed at the box office? Jack snorted ironically since he more than anyone abhorred cliches, and yet it felt like he was living one!
Thankfully, the US Military and the overwhelming majority of the Armed Forces’ dependents, as well as many of their close family members, had already been protected. Military personnel with medical training would be directly involved in administering the MCD–238β to the public. Regular personnel would be involved in the complex logistics of ensuring that everyone in the US received the vaccine. And it must be achieved while maintaining security. So now, this subcommittee, originally formed to figure out the already complicated logistics of mass immunisation for everyone on the down low, was scrambling, trying to solve numerous new issues in vaccinating their entire population, given that the ground rules had changed at the eleventh hour.
Obviously, Homeworld and its various committees began working on distribution issues right from the start. Now they were finishing up vaccinating essential services workers: doctors, nurses and other health care workers; emergency services workers; law enforcement departments and agencies; and other essential government employees. Soon, they would need to begin vaccinating the general public and therein lay the problem, since the powers that be suddenly changed the mission’s parameters. In effect, plunging the fate of the whole damn planet into additional jeopardy to cover their collective asses.
As the head of Homeworld Command, Jack didn’t always attend every meeting of the various subcommittees tasked with organising different components of the mission. That would not be practical; instead, he relied on their chairpersons’ reports, but a couple of days ago, at the insistence of President Walsh, he’d been ordered to brief a congressional subcommittee known as the Gang of Eight. The committee expressed substantial objections to aspects of the MCD–238β vaccine program, necessitating his attendance at today’s meeting, as their last-minute objections posed serious impediments to the entire planet’s security.
In turn, he dragged along his second-in- command, Lt Col Davis, insisting on his attendance at today’s meeting, too. Most people underestimated Paul Davis, believing he was merely Jack’s adjunct, an extremely affable and efficient officer, who was either his flunky or minder, depending on who you asked. The reality was that Paul Davis, at O’Neill’s insistence, had been promoted to the deputy directorship as his organisational skills and analytical brain made him much more valuable as an administrator than a mere personal assistant or fixer. That said, both officers knew that Davis would never rise above the rank of Deputy Director, as he had neither the field experience nor the desire to gain it that was necessary to run Homeworld.
With the unexpected obstacles thrown at them while rolling out the MCD–238β vaccine despite already achieving the impossible and manufacturing enough doses to ensure Earth’s population was covered in record time, Jack insisted they needed Davis’ administrative abilities and his sneaky brain (although he didn’t verbalise that thought). Jack also cajoled Daniel into setting aside his parental duties, allowing Vala to pick up the slack with Clare, Nicholas and Riley Faxon because O’Neill needed his input, too. If Sam had been here, he would have dragged her along as well, even if this wasn’t in her or Daniel’s wheelhouse. Even if he acknowledged that anthropology was probably more apropos to the frustrating situation they now faced than Carter’s astrophysics background, though, with her MIA, it was a moot point.
O’Neill wished he could have brought DiNozzo in to offer his perspective on this issue as well, because he had a unique problem-solving approach to situations that often left people asking why they’d failed to see what he did. Unfortunately, it wasn’t worth risking his security. He would have him read the minutes later and see if he had one of his suggestions that might rival the Paddington cold bombs. The Paddington Bombs aka the Rhino Virus Bombs, their last line of defence should their vaccination plans for the world hit a snag, were simple but brilliant. Jack just hoped they never had to use them.
Still, after stepping out for a much-needed break and to check in with his people back at the Pentagon, Jack felt an undeniable craving for a piece of pecan pie that smacked into him like a freight train. No one made it better than the one at the SGC commissary, and he knew indulging his sweet tooth sometimes led him to come up with a crazy, off-the-wall plan that had saved the day, even when it sounded nuts to everyone else. Jack grabbed a slice (knowing he’d pay for it on the treadmill later) and a cup of black coffee, because what was pecan pie without coffee? He nodded to a few of the long-termer members of the SGC, who smirked at his tray perceptively.
He chose an unoccupied table, noting nostalgically that the one SG-1 (and everyone else) used to consider theirs was occupied by a bunch of Marines whose faces he didn’t know. Jack swiftly placed them as MPs, not yet assigned to field teams, recognising an absence of the subtle yet unmistakable aura that the field teams acquired almost immediately after stepping through the gate a few times. Were he forced to define the difference between field and non-field teams for a stranger, he would probably observe that SGC field teams survived countless situations for which they hadn’t been trained, as regular military trainers could never know (or imagine) the crazy shit that went on in the galaxy. Nor could they envisage technology lying around just waiting for someone to stumble over. Field teams often had to ignore rules – for example, like the laws of physics. Honestly, he’d lost count of all the bizarre situations they’d encountered that should not have been physically possible. The out-of-the-box thinking, actions that required instinctive or sometimes counter-intuitive approaches, or the ability to simply back yourselves in a crisis, which might feel like the only choice you had if you wanted to come out of a mission alive, couldn’t be covered in training. You had to be there, and importantly, survive.
The bottom line was that field teams understood that very little was constant out in the wider universe beyond their experience. They understood that every time you set foot into the wormhole in the gate room, exiting on another world, you’d better check your preconceived notions and biases at the door, or you wouldn’t survive long out there in the galaxy. These brand-new recruits who had yet to earn the ‘privilege of going through the wormhole’ didn’t understand that arrogance in the superiority of Earth’s training was a good way to end up dead, because sometimes it was sheer dumb luck, creative thinking or complete insanity that saved your ass out there in on other worlds. Humility was earned!
Jack also noted the understated way the SGC field teams regarded the newbies, knowing that, for all their arrogant belief in their abilities and special training, the exceptionalism they so proudly donned like a special merit badge wouldn’t survive the very first crisis they faced. What could ultimately mean their survival, however, was the ability to forget everything they thought about their exceptionalism and adapt to their environment.
As he scraped the last morsel of his pie into his mouth, his thoughts turned unsurprisingly to the meeting about to reconvene on Level 22, which they’d appropriated from NORAD. Although all of the Civilian Brains Trust co-opted to the MCD –238β Vaccine Dispersal Subcommittee or VaDS had, by necessity, been read in on the Stargate Program, the level of security checks required to go through security clearances every time they met (which was frequently), deemed it more practical and faster to bypass Stargate security and use the NORAD facilities which they did from time to time.
As he returned the stiff salutes from the newer SGC members, Jack sensed everyone was wondering if he was here to announce the new leader of the base. He also exchanged low-key pleasantries with a couple of the staff who had served under him, including Master Sergeant Siler, still sporting his trusty oversized wrench like a personal talisman.
Pushing his flippant thoughts back into a mental compartment as he exited the SCG elevator, Jack nodded to the SF at the security checkpoint guarding the only entrance between the Stargate complex and NORAD elevators. Like MSgt Siler, Sergeant Conrad Stewart was a veteran of the SGC, having formerly served on a field team before receiving a serious injury and transferring to base security. This elevator took them the rest of the way to the surface, and you had to pass through the levels of NORAD to leave the mountain. Entering the elevator, he made his way up to Level 22, his game face firmly in place and projecting a can-do attitude as he exited and made his way back to the meeting room.
It was time to regroup and figure out how to overcome the honking huge “problem” that those damned asshats had handed him. Clearly, he must have been living in a bubble these last few years. Because he had absolutely no idea that, potentially, this issue could turn into a deal breaker. How could they move mountains to manufacture enough doses of vaccine for every single individual on Earth in such a short time frame, only to fall short at the last hurdle because of politicians? All this time, they’d been so focused on how to undertake a massive program around the globe, when there was an elephant in the room they’d failed to notice. And he really should have gotten a clue about the pachyderm from Sarah’s…er, Lauren, his ex-wife’s reaction when she heard about their plans to secretly mass-immunise the world. But, in his defence, he had other things on his mind.
Earlier that morning, Dr Inge Rasmussen had started the ball rolling today, diplomatically referring to the ‘elephant’ in the room as vaccine hesitancy. Many of the committee members just stared at the Danish epidemiologist blankly, not understanding what she meant.
“I don’t understand, Doctor,” Major Ames told her, trying and failing not to sound impatient. “What is vaccine hesitancy when it’s at home?”
The Dane sighed, probably thinking the major was a typical ill-educated military type, and Jack supposed she might have a point in this case.
“My apologies, Major. WHO-SAGE describes vaccine hesitancy as a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services. They note that vaccine hesitancy is complex and context-specific, varying across time, place and vaccines. It includes factors such as complacency, convenience and confidence,” she explained, leaving him and others in the room with many more questions than answers.
Dr Eddie Yap, born in Malaysia, who’d trained as a medical doctor at the National University of Malaysia before completing his epidemiological post-doctorate degree at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, obviously realised they were floundering and chimed in helpfully.
“WHO is the World Health Organisation,” he explained, “and SAGE stands for the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation, and advises the World Health Organisation on matters of immunology.”
“And Vaccine Hesitancy is a thing?” Jack clarified for himself and others in the room.
Dr Rasmussen said firmly, “Yes, absolutely.”
Yap looked equally serious. “I think vaccine hesitancy is probably a much too polite term that tends to downplay the seriousness of what we are facing in looking at vaccinating the entire population of the planet,” he said grimly. “Although it’s not a term used in academia, I believe anti-vaxxer is more commonly used amongst lay people to categorise those individuals who refuse vaccines.”
To prove his point, most of the people around the table nodded when initially, they had looked genuinely befuddled.
Shaking his head like that would make the craziness go away, Major Ames responded incredulously, “You’re telling me that all these people aren’t merely a bit hesitant about getting a jab?”
He knew that his desire for sanity and order had never worked in the past, but Jack looked at Daniel, hoping he would deny this craziness. Unfortunately, he had nodded sombrely.
“Afraid so, Major. It’s a thing!”
Jack thought of the massive number of vaccinations he’d been given when he joined the Air Force, determined to become a pilot, which he had. Then there were more when he became a Special Forces operative, travelling within Eastern Europe, chiefly former Soviet states of the USSR, but also on ops to the Balkans. Later, when he went on missions to the Middle East, he’d received another swag of vaccines all aimed at protecting him from the likely germ warfare agents that their intel revealed (or speculated) that rogue states and enemies were experimenting with. Back then, the USSR was running around assassinating dissidents with poison. Ricin Gas killed 12 people and injured hundreds more in Japan in 1995.
He reflected on all the agencies that were threatened with Anthrax and how Alex Paddington had opened a letter sent to NCIS with weaponised Yersinia pestis, aka the Black Plague. The spores had been biologically engineered not to respond to antibiotics, and he’d very nearly died and been left permanently affected by it. If Vala hadn’t healed him with the Goa’uld Healing Device, Carolyn Lam had told Jack he was looking at dying at least twenty years prematurely from cardio-pulmonary disease due to his scarred lungs.
So yeah, the head of Homeworld Command was having real trouble wrapping his head around vaccine hesitancy or anti-vaxxers, even though he and his old team had plenty of conversations about it. And he wasn’t the only one finding it difficult.
“So, if they are hesitant…what does that mean? Those politicians are gonna make us convince them to take the MCD –238β vaccine? What if it isn’t a jab? What if it’s a nasal spray?” Major Marchetti demanded hotly. “We’re also working on a dispersal system to vaccinate people in remote areas via communal water sources,” he said, hopefully.
Dr Rasmussen, who had just joined them today, looked as if she’d swallowed a lemon, an extremely bitter one. “Vaccinating people without their informed consent is very unethical,” she said reproachfully. “Particularly when we know that they would be highly likely to refuse the vaccine if we sought their opinion.”
“Understood, Doctor.” Jack nodded. “But so is letting Shen Xiaoyi and her loony-tunes minions infect them with a highly potent drug, which will render them incapable of EVER being capable of exercising informed consent. They will literally be permanent, mindless zombies who would kill their own family if so ordered. Plus, it’s flat-out impossible to get informed consent for eight billion-odd people without showing our hand to Ambassador Shen. So, tell me, which choice would you prefer?”
Pulling a moue of distaste, the Dane ducked her head in unhappiness. “Yes, General, I understand, but it doesn’t make it any more palatable.”
“Welcome to my world,” he acknowledged somewhat gruffly because sometimes he hated geeks!
“So how many of these vaccine-hesitaters are we talking about? A few thousand or so?” Paul asked the experts in the room optimistically.
Dr Yap snorted, not in amusement but disgust. “Oh, how I wish, Colonel Davis. Unfortunately, we could be looking at a lot more than that, just in the US alone. Surveys from the American Academy of Paediatrics found that the rate of parents who refused one or more recommended vaccines for their children increased from 9.1% in 2006 to a staggering 16.7% in their 2013 surveys. It could even be higher by now.”
Most of the participants looked suitably shocked, but Carolyn Lam nodded emphatically. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s hardly surprising, given what occurred here on base.” she nodded with a meaningful look at her colleagues from the SGC: Bill Lee, Daniel and Jack.
“True that!” Daniel said, frustrated.
“Why is that?” One of the engineers tasked with logistics asked curiously.
Dr Lam looked at the two epidemiologists searchingly. “Do we know if there is a strong anti-vaxxer movement here in Denver, specifically becoming active in or around Cheyenne Mountain, that was formed after June 2006?”
Jack swore softly as the penny dropped, and Daniel looked grim.
Eddie Yap looked confused. “Well…um, not sure about a timeline, but I believe there is a group here in Colorado City that is quite active politically.”
“The damned Ori Plague that got out of the base and infected Colorado was in June 2006. It spread to Canada and Mexico, and people were dropping like flies. Many died, and Europe, the Brits and Russia closed their borders,” Jack explained angrily.
There were times when he really didn’t know which of their super Alien foes he hated more, and he still was fucking furious with the Asgard for being almost as stupid as the Ancients. The whole mess with the Ori would have been very different if Thor’s people hadn’t cloned themselves into existential egocentric extinction and had become so preoccupied towards the end!
Of course, everyone here knew about the Ori plague and how incredibly close Earth and its people had come to facing complete annihilation. Not for the first time, either. Roughly seven years before the Ori Plague, Apophis and his son Korel had turned up in Earth’s orbit, determined to blow their blue planet out of the solar system and failed… just barely. Although the Ori plague was obviously highly classified information, everyone here had been read in on the basics, and there were nods of understanding all around the table.
Still, being one of the world’s most highly classified secrets didn’t stop the conspiracy nuts from doing some amateur sleuthing and theorising that the secret NORAD military base had likely been ground zero for the mysterious plague. If it was creating vaccine hesitancy or worse, an antivaxxer movement that was going to make saving the world from aliens or some of their own people with evil designs to take over the world (or in Shen’s case) the Milky Way, it was time for a rethink. Perhaps it might be time to declassify the biggest secret about the Stargate and the hundreds of planets and races they’d already encountered just in their own galaxy.
But Jack also knew that declassifying the Stargate and everything that followed was not something that they could do right now. It was a decision that needed to be carried out systematically and dispassionately, not in a panic, because one of their so-called IOA partners was using technology obtained from Atlantis to enslave the entire planet.
“Holy Hannah,” he ejaculated, unaware he’d used one of Carter’s favourite catch phrases out loud.
He was usually far more discreet, even though they weren’t doing anything wrong, as they’d only begun a relationship after he had moved to DC and taken over Homeworld Command. And besides, sometimes their relationship consisted of intimate emails that acknowledged their feelings for each other, rather than doing anything about them. And now…each day that elapsed with no word of the George Hammond 304 Battle Cruiser, it was more likely that Carter and the crew were dead. At least, according to the powers that be.
Daniel and Paul noticed his subtle misstep, always so careful not to give fodder to the naysayers, eager to point the finger at Samantha Carter. Only too ready to accuse her of nepotism in getting to where she was, rather than because of her extraordinary scientific abilities, leadership skills and her exemplary military career. Maybe Carolyn had also figured out why he was so protective of Sam, since she swiftly called a hiatus of the meeting and privately took him aside. She sent him down to the SCG, ordering her take a mental time out before returning so they could come up with a viable solution to the anti-vaxxer situation in the MCD –238β vaccine program.
Now, as he sat back down, the meeting resumed
“Okay, when we took a pie break,” he quipped as there was a titter around the table, since several people knew his penchant for pie and cake. “So to recap, we’d learned how a nexus for anti-vaxxer unrest was in all probability the Ori Plague that escaped from the mountain. I’d hazard a guess that like all conspiracy nutjobs, the Colorado City whack-a-doddles blame it on secret government experiments?”
Dr Yap smirked, “Yes and lizard people,” he quipped too.
Paul, Jack, and Daniel exchanged enigmatic looks, recalling a few reptilian Alien entities that had found their way into the mountain, and Jack found himself mentally wincing, as something else slotted into place.
“Yes, well, aside from the Ori Plague that escaped the mountain as it was designed, I think it’s worth mentioning briefly a couple of other situations that might not have helped in tamping down the rampant delusions of these tin hat conspiracy guys.”
He looked at Daniel and said, “Those alien insects we encountered on that abandoned planet that dive bombed us and stung Teal’c. Their venom overwrote his DNA and turned him into a giant incubator for their offspring.”
“Yeah, BP6-3Q1,” Daniel responded, automatically recalling the SGC designation of the planet that SG-1 had gated to back in September 1998. “The city that was at least as advanced as us, probably more so, but had been abandoned.”
“Or the residents had been transformed from their original form into honking huge venomous insects,” Jack snarked back with a visceral shudder he couldn’t contain.
The rest of the subcommittee looked disturbed, appalled or intrigued, but Lieutenant Colonel Edwards, another member of the large logistical team, frowned stoically. “As grossly disturbing as that was, I don’t see what it has to do with the anti-vaxxers, General.”
“The evil scientists decided our Jaffa team member might contain the answers to how to defeat the Goa’uld,” Paul stated cynically.
Caro explained succinctly. “I wasn’t the CMO then, but basically, it seemed that every time Teal’c was attacked, or his life hung in the balance, some unethical Goebbels-leaning mad scientist, rather than saving him, tried to use him to create a biological weapon. In this instance, they attempted to transport him off base to some secret lab to let him ‘change’, but Teal’c escaped and hid out in Colorado City while he continued to morph into one of the alien insects, which could have been highly dangerous.”
“There was a manhunt, civilians encountered him and had to be quarantined, and a story was created that was not very credible,” Daniel clarified. “But I’m sure Jack’s right; it would have been fodder for conspiracy types because we could hardly tell people the truth.”
Carolyn nodded. “It would have caused mass panic if we did.”
“Yeah, it was bad,” Daniel agreed, “But you said there were two events, Jack. What was the other one? Was it Ma’Chello?” he queried, referring to an extremely old human alien the SGC encountered on another world roughly six months after the incident with Teal’c and the giant insects.
Ma’chello spent most of his adult life creating technology to destroy the Goa’uld and, towards the end, had become increasingly resentful of everything he’d sacrificed. Quite insane at the end, the old fellow tricked Daniel into a body swap using a device he created. Unknown to the SGC, the imposter, using Daniel’s much younger body, decided to keep it and stay on Earth, leaving Daniel in Ma’chello’s body, and soon to expire. Meanwhile, he went off to Colorado City to explore and experience life, leaving Daniel to die in his frail body.
Jack shook his head. “Naw, I wasn’t thinking about him. Yeah, there was a manhunt, but the cover story we put out about him being the great-grandfather of a NORAD commander, who had Alzheimer’s Disease and was experiencing hallucinations, was pretty solid. I doubt it raised any anti-vaxxer eyebrows,” he said, somewhat caustically.
“So, what was the other incident that stoked the conspiracy nuts’ paranoia?” the anthropologist demanded inquisitively.
Jack smirked, thinking briefly that his friend was insatiably curious. Even when they were staring down the barrel of disaster back when O’Neill led SG-1, Daniel could never contain his thirst for knowledge, even if sometimes, they almost came to blows over appropriate times and places to quench that thirst.
“It was back in 2004, after you ascended that first time and Jonas Quin was a member of SG1,” he said, explaining not only to the missing Daniel but the rest of the subcommittee.
We found some alien technology on P9X-391. It had ancient writing on it, and to be honest, it looked like a giant bug zapper. So naturally, Jonas and Carter pleaded for us to bring it home to the SCG.”
Daniel gave him a knowing look and grinned. “So, when did the shit hit the fan?”
O’Neill chuckled with wry amusement. “Not long. Not that long at all. We finished our medical exams and were cleared to go off duty after a quick debrief, naturally. I was going fishing!”
“Of course you were, and then what happened?” Danny bantered back at the General.
“Jonas started seeing great big honking bugs. Translucent flying bugs that could go straight through walls,” Jack said seriously.
“Were the bugs like the ones that attacked Teal’c and altered his DNA?” Caro asked, obviously trying to place the specific mission from the files she’d have read when she took over the SCG.
Jack looked at his friend, and Daniel smirked. “Nope!”
“I thought you weren’t there. How do you know, Dr Jackson?” Eddie Yap asked interestedly.
The two old team members shared a sardonic laugh as Daniel said, “Because those are the unwritten rules on SG-1. The first rule was it’s never that easy,” he explained with a fond shrug.
O’Neill grinned. “Daniel’s right about that. Yeah, they were totally different bugs, as it turned out. And surprisingly, these bugs were indigenous to Earth, just not normally visible in our dimension, but the bug zapper doohickie made it possible to see ‘em,” he said with a theatrical shudder.
“Anyhoo, the docs thought Jonas might be nutso because of exposure to Naquadriah, like his mentor, but then Teal’c and I started seeing the giant flying translucent bugs too. The problem was I was off base at a gas station when I saw them and freaked the hell right out. Plus, it was spreading all over the base like an epidemic, and soon the guy from the gas station started seeing them too, which did not go well,” the General revealed, somewhat redundantly.
“What was the cover story?” Eddie pushed, his black eyes alight with wonder.
“Well, it continued to spread through Colorado Springs. We said a chemical spill had caused hallucinations, but I don’t reckon Vernon Sharpe, the guy from the gas station who was a Gulf War Army Veteran, plus a good proportion of the other locals, believed it. When he saw me with a contingent of Marines from the base, looking for him, he took off and tried to flee on a small plane.
“So, you nearly had a much bigger outbreak?” Daniel asked.
“Yep, and I reckon that episode and Teal’c’s metamorphosis probably impacted paranoid anti-vaxxers in Colorado,” Jack concluded.
The two epidemiologists nodded seriously, Rasmussen stating, “That was extremely unfortunate, General O’Neill. You are correct that those security breaches would not have been helpful in terms of dealing with individuals who are already prone to a condition psychologists categorise as conspiracist ideation.”
Carolyn spoke up with a wry smile at the other participants. “For the rest of us, can you explain the meaning of the term conspiracist ideation, Doctor Rasmussen?”
“Researchers into vaccine hesitancy would characterise it as a tendency to believe in or assume a complex causal chain of secret events exists when there are other, more probable explanations to explain the phenomenon.”
Like a chemical spill causing mass hallucinations,” Daniel quipped, even if they all knew how serious the situation was.
Thinking out loud, Jack asked, “But what if we’d told them that it was bugs from a different dimension that were suddenly visible after a scientist created a device that let us see them? If we’d explained it to them and had them sign an NDA, because it would scare the pants off the general public to learn that there were giant translucent bugs that weren’t visible to the naked human eye? How would these conspiracy types have responded to the truth?”
Dr Yap guffawed. “And therein lies the terrible irony. They probably wouldn’t have believed you even then. Either they would think you were patronising them, or covering up something much bigger and more frightening, like Alien Bugs from Saturn invading us, because their lives depend almost entirely on the premise that monumental secrets exist that they are trying to uncover. They’d just insist that the truth about the bugs was a cover-up for something even more terrible.”
One of the Air Force engineers raised a good question. “Okay, so how do we deal with all these anti-vaxxers then?”
Dr Lam looked particularly grim as she volunteered her opinion, “Seeing that these vaccines are not optional in the normal sense that if you are infected, I’m not sure. You aren’t just impacting yourself and other individuals; you could be turned into a suicide bomber or an assassin. Refusal to take the vaccine poses a direct threat to the national security of every nation on the planet, so what do we do about people who resist taking the vaccine?”
Dr Rasmussen grimaced. “The psychology of vaccine hesitancy is complex. There’s not one single aetiology for vaccine hesitancy. I don’t know if it might help, but if we want to come up with a non-punitive means of administering the MCD –238β vaccine, it would be useful to understand the main attitudes we are likely to face, and then try to figure out how to counteract them,” she said, which sounded surprisingly logical and down-to-earth of her.
Carolyn nodded. “Sounds reasonable to me.”
Amidst the general assent for VaDS to attempt to find a way to vaccinate a significant group of Earth’s population that would, as things stood, refuse the MCD –238β vaccine, at least voluntarily, most people wanted to try. Besides, no one else seemed to have a better plan!
“So, what do we know about the psychology of these anti-vaxxer tin foil hatters?” Jack demanded, inpatient as ever, and looking hopefully at Rasmussen, Yap and Lam.
Yap shook his head. “With the future of the world at stake, my recommendation would be, ‘don’t rely on epidemiologists or doctors for understanding the multi-factorial motivations of vaccine-hesitant individuals.’ We need to seek out experts in behavioural attitudes,” was his clear recommendation.
Dr Rasmussen approved emphatically. “Agreed, Doctor Yap.”
“Okay, so we need to consult psychologists, I take it?” Daniel asked Yap, anxious to move things along.
Usually, Daniel loved meeting and exchanging knowledge with other academics and scientists. But with Clare and Nicholas, his twins from an alternate reality waiting for him back on Atlantis, he was suddenly keen to go home. Yes, Vala was there keeping a watchful eye on the fraternal twins, but despite his earlier beliefs that he wasn’t cut out for fatherhood, he had been amazed at how rapidly he’d bonded with them. And of course, there was also Riley Faxon, whom Daniel had immediately offered to foster or, if necessary, adopt. Not that he or Jack were willing to entertain the slightest notion that Sam might not come back to them.
Knowing his friend for so long, Jack had a good idea that Daniel was keen to get back to the twins, and he sympathised. Although Jack had been forced to reject the role of caregiver for his alternate-reality granddaughter, Sarah O’Neill, he still treasured every second he was able to spend with her. Still, the point of this meeting was to try to remove one of the two major obstacles preventing him from retiring as the head of Homeworld Command and spending time with his family. After they saved the world…AGAIN!
“Yeah, I know, but stay focused, Space Monkey. We have to secure our world for them,” he said obliquely.
Carolyn Lam looked sympathetic. “Why don’t we consult Dr O’Shea? She’s back on base now and is read in on the general situation, already.”
“Yeah, sureyabetcha,” O’Neill endorsed her suggestion. “Dr Jackson, why don’t you go and explain the situation and find out if she can assist us in this matter? In the meantime, we’ll move on to discussing how we go about vaccinating the rest of Earth’s population,” he said with a hint of a smirk as Daniel nodded eagerly.
Needing no further encouragement, Daniel pushed back his chair, barely avoiding knocking it over in his haste to locate the head of Psychological Services on Atlantis, who’d accompanied Carolyn and a couple of other scientists, a botanist and a virologist to the SGC to start planning on rolling out the MCD –238β vaccine worldwide without alerting Chen and her conspirators within her government. Timing was going to be key.
