03 - The First Amendment (2 page)

“Thank you, Major.”

As the command center for North American air and space defense, Cheyenne
Mountain was a popular destination for visitors, who invariably thought they
would get a guided tour of the guts of the mountain, an up-close-and-personal
look at the Operations Center, Space Control, Systems, and the other centers of
activity that provided surveillance and protection for the U.S. and Canada. The
fact that they had to book their visits well in advance probably enhanced their
expectations of all the highly technical, highly classified Stuff they were
going to get to see.

Invariably, the guests were disappointed to discover that all they were
really going to get was a presentation in the Visitors Center. They could have saved themselves the feeling if they’d only read the information handed out
ahead of time, or investigated the extensive Website that the Air Force Space
Command provided, but no. Every single time someone would stick his hand up in
the air and ask the ever-patient officer of the day, “When do we get to go
inside and see everything?”

As if,
Hammond thought, borrowing one of his granddaughters’ favorite
phrases.

The blue sedan pulled up at the gatehouse to the complex, and the sentry
carefully verified the driver’s identity and then the general’s, despite having
seen them at least four times a week for the past three years. As they passed
the Visitors Center, Hammond looked to see if the tourists were already lined up
to go inside. It was too early, of course. The Friday morning briefing was
always scheduled for 1000 hours, and it was only 0700. The buses wouldn’t arrive
for at least another three hours.

Satisfied, the sentry waved them through to the next checkpoint.

The sergeant parked the sedan, got the door—it was amazing how fast that man
moved, Hammond thought; he
never
managed to beat his driver to opening
the door—and escorted the general into the Mountain, where the
real
checkpoints began.

Palm scans, retina scans, visual comparisons. The “Detect” part of the holy
Security triad of “Detect Delay Respond” was so much a part of his daily life,
and had been for so long, he barely noticed it. He had gone through at least
three layers of obvious identification systems (and two more not so obvious) by
the time he got to the first set of elevators.

The Mountain had been hollowed out starting in 1961 as the very biggest and
best bomb shelter ever. It went fully operational in 1966. All through the Cold
War, Cheyenne Mountain had focused intently on the possibility that
thermonuclear bombs launched from somewhere in the Communist bloc might rain down on North
America. When the sky grew increasingly more crowded with satellites, they kept
an eye on those, too, monitoring the other side’s spy eyes, tracking the
possibility that death might come from space. They continued their job with
unrelaxed vigilance when the Cold War was declared “over,” well aware that
traffic in near space was increasing yearly and that the economic chaos that
succeeded the fall of the Berlin Wall had made nuclear weapons available to
countries and organizations that previously would have had little chance of
obtaining them.

And it wasn’t just the U.S. that kept its eyes on the skies. One of the side
benefits of having a special relationship with Canada was that the northern
country was as deeply involved in NORAD as was the U.S. itself. Command rotated
between the two countries. This year it happened to be the U.S. commanding.

The focus for NORAD, always, was on the threat from other countries. It was
the responsibility of their highly trained personnel to coordinate the response
to any threat to North America coming from within the atmosphere or outside it.
It didn’t matter whether they believed in a Chinese nuclear threat or little
green men from Mars; their job was to Respond and wipe them out of North
American skies. Army, Navy, and Air Force Space Command all had a role here.

And none of it was George Hammond’s concern.

Hammond passed the first set of elevators, and the second.

He was not accountable to the U.S. Air Force Space Command, or the U.S. Space
Command, or NORAD. His name appeared nowhere on their Table of Organization, and
he was not in their chain of command. General George Hammond and his personnel
had their offices even deeper in the hollowed-out mountain than that. They
weren’t concerned with the thermonuclear threat or the satellites in near space.

George Hammond commanded the Stargate Complex, and his concerns were
literally light-years away from NORAD’s and those of NORAD’s commanding
generals.

Light-years away and far more immediate. Hammond could only imagine how
annoyed they’d be to know that the biggest alien threat to North America, or
even to the whole planet, wasn’t going to appear in the air; it had already
materialized twenty-seven stories underneath their feet, in the very deepest
guts of Cheyenne Mountain.

And if the tourists at the Visitors’ Center had any idea what lay beneath
their feet as they sat squirming in hard plastic chairs through the droning
hour-and-a-half presentation complete with multimedia show and interactive
exhibits, they’d run screaming, he was certain.

Hammond liked to go first to the briefing room, overlooking the Gate, rather
than to his office. His first priority upon arrival at the Complex was reviewing
the reports of the various teams currently exploring the worlds of possibility
that were accessible through the Gate in the depths of the mountain. In that
sense, at least, Hammond’s project echoed USSPACECOM; he had Air Force, Army,
Navy, and Marine units reporting to him. Hardly anything else was the same.

It saved time to do that initial review in the same room where the team
commanders met. The wall of windows looked out over another room, three stories
tall, at the far end of which a huge shape, flat and round like a pancake set on
end, focused the eye. A shallow steel grid ramp led up to the disk, which
consisted of two concentric rings inscribed with alien symbols, surrounding a
gleaming iris of overlapping steel plates that completely covered the center.
Ramp and disk were set off from the rest of the room by a wide painted border of
yellow and black stripes alternating with the legend keep clear.

This was the Stargate—the portal to alien worlds, the gateway through which
Hammond’s teams ventured forth to gather intelligence and possibly find new
weapons to fight the Goa’uld, an alien menace that had already visited Earth,
taken samples of human populations and cultures, and seeded them on distant worlds for the purpose of harvesting them later as hosts for their
larvae.

The rest of the room was taken up with computer consoles and wires and very
busy personnel, deciphering signals sent by probes, running programs to try to
determine how much the original coordinates of the Gate had been thrown off by
galactic drift in the millennia since the Gate was placed on Earth; more busy
personnel preparing those probes; and still more trying to keep the computers
running instead of crashing from the glut of alien data. And it truly was
“alien”—from far more distant stars than NORAD dreamed.

In those early hours, the room was quiet and peaceful, and he always got more
done than in his own office. Master Sergeant Harriman, his aide-decamp, knew
Hammond well, and always had a summary and a cup of coffee waiting for him at
his place at the end of the long polished table. He settled in to read until his
command staff—leaders of the teams on standby, the medical staff, logistics
support, and the various analysis teams—showed up.

He had no patience with commanders who made grand entrances when everyone
else had already seated themselves. Besides, he liked to see who came in
prepared and who had to fumble in briefcases for papers. Harriman, prepared as
always, took out copies of all the most current updates to the various reports
already supplied, ready to slide them under Hammond’s eye as each individual
spoke. Shortly thereafter, the rest of his command staff entered and took their
places.

There was O’Neill, practically bouncing as he came in. Energy levels too
high—the tall colonel needed another mission. He was a good officer but tended
to be impatient. “Good morning, sports fans!”

“Morning, Colonel,” Harriman acknowledged.

A few of the others, not as inclined to be cheery in the morning, glared at him. Hammond, remembering his dream, could not
prevent a chill from traveling up his spine as he observed them. O’Neill,
getting himself coffee from the table in the back, was bantering with some of
the other team commanders.

Nearly everyone in the room had been in his dream, he realized. Plus many
others who weren’t at command level. And they’d all looked at him for direction,
just as they did in real life.

Rusalka sat on the other side of him from Harriman. They were both well
aware of his little idiosyncrasies by this time and had all their ducks in a
row. Her tapping of her papers into an obsessively neat, perfectly squared-off
pile served to distract him. It had only been a dream, after all. A nightmare.
He dismissed the memory.

Assorted other SG commanders, in various stages of readiness, took their
places. The Medical staff arrived, looking concerned but not worried, if that
distinction could be drawn from across a crowded room. Logistics. Security.

Neither NORAD nor USSPACECOM knew anything at all about the Goa’uld. It was
part of Hammond’s mission to keep it that way. Putting the briefing room in a
position to overlook the Gate served to keep his team’s minds firmly on their
mission—as if they needed any reminder.

That mission was clearly understood and defined by presidential directive:
“to perform reconnaissance, determine threats, and if possible make peaceful
contact” with as many worlds as possible. His people, gathering and settling in
at their places around the table, were the best of the best from all U.S.
military services. They used some of the most powerful computing hardware in the
world to calculate the proper sequence of signals to find new Gates and new
worlds. Alien worlds.

There was nothing in all of the country, probably in all of the world, more secret than the work they did right here. These
missions were necessary reconnaissance to ensure Earth’s survival in an
undeclared war against the Goa’uld, a race of parasitic aliens who had
borrowed—or stolen—the Gate technology to make travel between worlds easier by
opening wormholes between predetermined coordinates. Thousands of years in the
past, one of the Goa’uld had set a Gate in ancient Egypt and used it as a base
to kidnap humans and seed them all over the galaxy. Now humans used the Gates to
try to restore contact with those scattered populations and, to the best of
their ability, to find weapons that would enable them to meet the Goa’uld on
equal terms.

It wasn’t the kind of war that required divisions in the field. It wasn’t the
kind of war that required propaganda to engage public opinion. It was a
desperate, tiny, minute kind of war waged by a handful of men and women who
dared not admit to the human race just how dreadful the consequences of failure,
of losing, might be.

The first report was always Captain—Dr.—Janet Frasier’s. As head of the
Medical Department, she had the responsibility to oversee the health of the
teams, monitor casualties, and, perhaps most important, to ensure that no one
brought back anything insidious or contagious. Warner, her second-in-command,
was present at this meeting, somewhat to Hammond’s silent relief. Warner was the
surgeon, and if he could be spared from the operating theater, it meant that no
one needed what they’d come to call, in the gruesome humor typical of people
trying to deal with the sometimes unspeakable “body work.”

“The bacteria carried back by SG-3 seem to have died off almost immediately,”
Frasier summarized. “We conclude—provisionally—that the bug is native to M70619,
and therefore not well adapted to attack the human species.” She slapped the folder shut with something resembling
relief. “SG-3 should be ready for return to full duty in less than a week.”
Putting the first of her manila folders down, she opened the second. “As you are
aware, sir, SG-2 suffered severe casualties, but all of those who got back are
expected to survive.” She frowned at little at the case reports in her hand.
“We’re seeing some new kinds of injuries, not consistent with earlier
experience, and we’re wondering if we can get more information on the weapons
used. But I emphasize that we do expect recoveries.”

There was a little silence, and an ostentatious not-looking at one of the
officers seated midway down the table.

“Good news,” Hammond nodded, as if there had never been an awkward pause. He
went on to the next subject on the agenda automatically, and Frasier sat down
again with obvious gratitude.

The morning briefing always followed the same pattern: Frasier’s casualty
reports and medical updates; reports on which teams were out among the stars;
potential new destinations; problem areas; and basic housekeeping. It was one of
those reliable things in the universe.

So next Harriman stood up.

“Currently we’ve got five teams out, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Fourteen.
SG-6 and -7 are both on P3X-1492, working on the Tecumseh Codex. They report
excellent progress.

“SG-8 is doing some follow-up scientific studies on P5R-221. They still
haven’t found any sign of human survivors there, but they’re not sure whether
that’s due to climatic changes or if the seed stock they brought with them
wasn’t able to adjust to the new world. It looks like they managed to last maybe
three or four generations before they died out.”

Hammond shook his head, wondering how many worlds had been like twenty-two-one, how many human lives had been wasted by
a profligate parasite.
Let them die,
he could imagine the Goa’uld saying.
Earth will make more.