03 - The First Amendment (8 page)

Samuels coughed, spraying a fine mist of red condiment across the table.
Kinsey could see red flecks across the beige tuna where there hadn’t been any
red flecks before, and he pushed his salad away, deciding he wasn’t all that
hungry anymore anyway. There weren’t any public dining facilities at CMAS, but
he figured he could last until dinnertime. As long as he didn’t have to share
dinner with this guy.

“Oh, no,” Samuels said as soon as he cleared his throat. “No, no no. Roswell.
Ha ha. That’s funny. That was a weather balloon.”

The waitress came by and Kinsey shifted his plate at her, silently asking her
to take it away.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“No, nothing’s wrong. I’m just not hungry. I’ll have another cup of coffee,
thanks.”

Samuels was deep into another bite of hamburger, trying to hold the bun and
meat on an upside-down fork with his knife. He might have picked up the trick in
England, Kinsey thought, but he certainly hadn’t practiced it much.

“You’ll get the regular briefing along with everybody else at the Visitors
Center,” Samuels mumbled. “Then you’ll get to go inside. No cameras or tape
recorders, of course. But you’ll see…” He swallowed, reached for a napkin
to pat his lips. “You’ll see some really interesting things at Cheyenne Mountain
Air Station. USSPACECOM is in there too. You’ll get to see the satellite
tracking, Air Defense Ops, Satellite Warning, Combined Intelligence—”

“Space Control,” Kinsey interrupted in a bored voice. “I
know
all this
stuff already. I know it’s important and ‘essential to the national security’. I
just don’t see that it’s
interesting.
The Cold War is over. Unless you
think the Chinese or the Serbs are going to launch missiles at us, who cares?”

The waitress brought his coffee, complete with a couple of miniature cream
containers. He pried one open, only to find that it had gone beyond clotted and
well into sour.

Black coffee. Wonderful. And it wasn’t decaf, either. Just what he needed at
an altitude of more than a mile—he was going to have a case of the raving
jitters before this day was through.

Samuels made a point of waiting until the waitress was out of earshot. “I
don’t think you give us enough credit,” he said mysteriously. “More things in
heaven and earth, you know. That’s Shakespeare.”

Kinsey sighed and shook his head. Dad—or maybe Mom, he couldn’t decide—owed
him one for this, he thought. Even if he didn’t have any more interesting
assignments on tap, he could have spent this time fishing or something. But no,
he was going to be dragged into an Air Force public relations tour. He’d get
paid for it. Big hairy deal.

The check came, and the two men paid their bill and made their way out into
the bright mountain sunshine. Nice little town, Colorado Springs, Kinsey
thought. Pretty. Peaceful. Home to the Air Force Academy, the Canadian Forces
Support Unit (Colorado Springs), the hundreds or thousands of military personnel
and all their dependents who served at Peterson and Falcon Air Force Bases and
Fort Carson, and, of course, to Cheyenne Mountain Air Station. Pretty big
responsibility for a pretty little town.

Well, maybe not that little. The metropolitan area, spread out under the
benign, ever-snowcapped guardianship of Pikes Peak, was nearly half a million
strong. There had to be
something
besides the military and unsolved
murders keeping Colorado Springs thriving.

They got into the rental car and started the drive up to the mountain,
leaving the pretty, peaceful little company city behind.

Teal’C had never been to Roswell, though O’Neill thought he might take the
Jaffa there sometime, just for the hell of it. Then he could claim there really
had
been an alien in the little New Mexico town, at least once. It was
the kind of in-joke that appealed to him. Maybe he’d suggest it to the whole
team, though Carter would argue about it. Carter always argued. It was one of
the delightful aspects of her personality.

He was getting a case of pre-mission nerves again, he could tell. It had been
too long since SG-1 had actually been through the Gate—at least two weeks. He
wanted to get out and
do
something. Scrabbling in his desk, he found a
cache of rubber bands and began firing them at the poster on the opposite wall.

Carter and Jackson might view the down time as a great opportunity to extend
their studies in astrophysics and anthropology, respectively, but O’Neill was
sure that Teal’C, at least, shared his need to be active, to actually accomplish
something. Every day that went by was one more day his people, his family were
held in slavery by the Goa’uld.

Stacked on his desk were volumes of reports, the printed version of several
CDs’ worth of accumulated information on the Goa’uld, the Nox, the crystals of
P3X-562, and all the other worlds, races, and entities they’d met so far. SG-1
was responsible for most of that information. O’Neill wanted to go get more
information, and let the desk pilots like Randolph and Rusalka scrabble through
it day in and day out.

From his point of view, the most fruitful mission would be one to the
location he had mentally dubbed the “war world.” It held the possibility of
finding new allies and new weapons they could use against the Goa’uld. The Goa’uld might be one side of the war, in fact, and if that
was the case he wouldn’t mind joining in a firefight or two. Strictly in the
course of achieving his mission’s primary goal, naturally.

Squinting, he incorporated a worn-down pencil into his artillery. It bounced
harmlessly off Antares. He huffed out an exasperated breath. He wanted to
move,
dammit, and trying to push Rusalka into making a recommendation before
she was ready was an exercise in futility.

Maybe he could pick up something from Morley. He’d buy the poor guy a drink
in the canteen, pump him about the tactics the Jaffa had used to lure him in. He
had a feeling that Morley knew more than he was telling—the report was curiously
flat, without much substance to it. It was a little mystery, what had gone so
thoroughly wrong on Etaa. Maybe Teal’C could get something out of the major—no,
bringing the Jaffa along, with his forehead brand marking him as the property of
Apophis, was probably a bad idea. Morley wouldn’t want to deal with him. In
fact, it was his attitude toward the other man that had led to O’Neill’s
negative recommendation in the first place.

Although, dammit, Teal’C was on their side, and he might have some valuable
insights. Morley was going to
have
to learn to deal with the Jaffa
eventually. Hammond had wanted to give Morley a chance, despite O’Neill’s views
on the subject, and had allowed him to command SG-2 for the Etaa recovery. And
look where
that
led.

Spilled milk buttered no parsnips. O’Neill bounced to his feet. This time of
day Teal’C was probably in either the armory or the gym. He’d go find him and
then they’d hunt down Morley, find out whatever it was he was holding back about
Etaa. Maybe he could change the general’s mind about going back, and he could find out what really happened to the tall, gentle people who lived
there.

It was a plan. More important, it was something to
do.

The first stop, of course, was the research office again. Randolph didn’t
even look up as he came in, and Rusalka gave him an annoyed glare and shake of
the head when he demanded, “Either of you know where Dave Morley is?”

Outside the office, Dave Morley, on his way to Medical, heard his name
mentioned and paused to eavesdrop, trying to hear what the infamous O’Neill had
to say about him.

Shamelessly, the infamous O’Neill looked over Randolph’s shoulder at the pile
of paper her printer was spitting out in a steady stream. “What’s this all
about?”

He picked up the pile of paper and began shuffling through it. “Articles?
Post. NewsWorld. LA Times.
‘Secrets and the Public’s Right to Know.’ Op-ed?
They’re all by Frank Kinsey. That’s interesting…”

“That’s for General Hammond,” Randolph growled, still bending over a hot
keyboard as she searched for more articles through an international library
database.

“And why is General Hammond so interested in Frank Kinsey, modern
journalist?” he wanted to know. “And what relation is he to our not-so-loved
Senator Kinsey?”

“His son, and he’s coming out to the complex today.
Not
to visit us,”
Rusalka forestalled the colonel’s reaction with a hastily raised hand.
“Apparently just being a tourist.”

“Apparently just jerking our chain, more like it.” O’Neill growled. “Is he
coming here?”

“Not supposed to,” Rusalka reiterated patiently. “If you don’t mind, Colonel,
we’re putting together a background briefing, just in case. And no,” she added as he opened his mouth, “I haven’t the faintest idea where Major Morley
is. It wasn’t my turn to watch him.”

Outside the office, Major Morley stood indecisively for a moment, and then
turned away—away from the conversation in the staff office, which wasn’t about
him after all, and away from Medical and his appointment with Janet Frasier.

A sudden emergency claimed Dr. Frasier’s attention. One of the survivors of
the incident on Etaa went into full cardiac arrest, and it took all the skills
she and Dr. Warner and a full complement of surgical staff could muster to get
the man’s heart back into a steady rhythm. Then they had to determine how they’d
missed the problem to begin with. The man was one of several who had injuries
not consistent with Jaffa weaponry. She’d told Hammond—she’d told the
airman—that they were all going to live, and they would if she had anything to
say about it. So it was considerably more than twenty minutes later when she
glanced up at the wall clock and realized that David Morley had never reported
in as ordered.

She considered having him paged and decided against it. The man was under
stress as it was, and he obviously felt that he had screwed up, that everyone in
the complex was accusing him.

Time, perhaps, for her to take a break anyway and go looking for him. She
peeled off the last set of gloves and untied her surgical mask, and then paused.
She could at least ask Security if he’d left the complex, and if not, she could
go enlist Sam to help her. He’d probably consider two women less threatening
than one determined doctor by herself, and maybe they could just talk to him
over lunch. Or listen to him over lunch. Whatever it took to get him to come
down to Medical and get meds.

Samantha Carter was neck-deep in fifth-order mathematics and utterly happy.
One of her duties, or perhaps her obsessions, was trying to figure out how the
Stargate actually worked—what triggered the opening of the wormhole, why waves
and photons could go both ways through it but nothing else could, the
back-calculation of where worlds had been when the table of coordinates had been
made up and where those worlds were now. She was hunched over her desk, a towel
slung around her neck, dressed in T-shirt and fatigues, sharing the lab with
half a dozen other scientists who were working on much the same problems. Most
of them, of course, were in uniform, but the few civilians working on the
project didn’t have a dress code and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they
did. It made for a relaxed atmosphere. Carter wasn’t reporting anywhere today
that she knew of, so she figured she might as well just be comfortable.

At one end of the lab was an electronic whiteboard covered in symbols at
least as cryptic as the Goa’uld glyphs. A couple of civilians dressed in jeans
and Birkenstocks were arguing in soft voices in front of the board, in an
ongoing discussion about whether one particular sign should be positive,
negative, or perhaps some third fuzzy state dependent on an earlier section of
the equation. Carter was just as well pleased that her current problem dealt
with an entirely different aspect of the wormhole. She was working on a method
of predicting the next Gate location. If it worked, she hoped to be able
eventually to extrapolate backward and perhaps, one day, find the homeworld of
the aliens who had originally built the system of Gates.

Every once in a while a piece of the puzzle seemed to fall into place,
leading one inch closer to solution. A private puzzle with a public solution,
one day. Or at least so she hoped.

“Hey, Sam.”

She looked up to find Dr. Frasier looking around the doorjamb. “Yo?”

“Have you seen Major Morley?”

Carter blinked. “Uh. No.” She looked up at the clock on the wall, was
startled to find that it was long after noon already. No wonder her stomach was
rumbling.

Frasier looked concerned. Carter closed her laptop screen and got up, leaving
the discussion and the lovely, ordered world of mathematics behind, and joined
the doctor.

“He was supposed to report to me in Medical,” Frasier explained. “That was
over an hour ago. I’m a bit worried about him.”

“He didn’t seem very happy this morning,” Sam agreed. “I only saw him
briefly, though.”

“At least he hasn’t left the complex. Maybe he’s in his quarters.”

“Have you asked Security to find him for you?”

“I don’t want to make a fuss about it. I’m trying to convince him this is not
that big a deal. I’m getting worried, though.”

“I’ll help you look.”

Having discovered Teal’C in the gymnasium as expected, O’Neill explained what
he wanted to the Jaffa as they swept down the corridors to the last likely place
an anguished officer might hide out. Teal’C was more interested in the gossip
about the senator’s son than he was about interrogating Morley; his impression
of the former commander of SG-2 was extremely low. Nonetheless, O’Neill was
right; it was something to do. So the massive Jaffa went along. He could always
return to the weight machines later.

The “Officers’ Club” buried in the heart of the mountain was pretty much like
every other such club on every other military base: a bar, some small tables, and a few larger tables for civilized meals. The only difference was that
this club was considerably smaller than the average, and thus, there was no
regular Saturday bingo.