Chapter 3 : CHILDREN OF THE GODS — Part 1
[Level 25 Corridor — Cheyenne Mountain — Day 1, 0847 Hours]
The first alarm went off at five, and I was already awake.
Three hours of fragmented sleep, most of it spent staring at the system's countdown timer blinking silently in the dark. I'd showered — lukewarm water, institutional soap that stripped a layer of skin — and dressed in clean contractor blues before the second alarm sounded. Coffee from the commissary at 0600, black, two cups. Breakfast skipped. My stomach couldn't hold anything solid.
By 0830, I was exactly where I needed to be: Level 25, the medical wing, reviewing a clipboard of electrical inspection forms I'd already completed yesterday. Loitering with purpose. Contractors checked wiring. Wiring ran through walls. Walls existed near every room in the facility. Nobody questioned a man with a clipboard.
The klaxons hit at 0847.
Not the standard base alert — this was the gate activation alarm, a rising wail that punched through concrete and rattled the fluorescent tubes in their housings. Red emergency lighting snapped on, casting the corridor in alternating stripes of white and crimson.
[ALERT: UNSCHEDULED OFFWORLD ACTIVATION — LEVEL 28 — GATE ROOM]
The text appeared and vanished in the same breath. I didn't need the system to tell me what was happening. The PA crackled:
"Unscheduled offworld activation! All security teams to the gate room! This is not a drill!"
Boots pounded past me. Two airmen sprinted toward the elevator, sidearms drawn, faces locked in the specific expression of soldiers who trained for this but never expected to use it. A nurse stepped out of the medical bay doors, looked both ways, and retreated back inside.
I pressed against the wall and walked toward the stairwell. Not running. Running drew attention. A contractor jogging through a military emergency was a security concern. A contractor walking briskly toward the nearest exit was just scared.
The stairwell gave me access to Level 27. The sounds from below — Level 28 — were muffled by concrete and steel, but they carried. A deep thrumming vibration that I recognized from eight years of television: the Stargate engaging, the event horizon stabilizing, that distinctive whoosh of a wormhole establishing connection.
Then staff weapon fire.
The sound was nothing like television. On screen, it was a clean energy pulse, a dramatic burst of orange light. In reality, it was a concussive crack followed by a high-pitched whine, like a transformer exploding inside a tin can. The concrete walls amplified it, bounced it through corridors and stairwells until the whole mountain rang.
Screaming. Not dramatic screaming — operational screaming. Orders barked and cut short. Someone calling for a medic. The rapid chatter of M16 automatic fire answering the staff blasts.
I stopped on the Level 27 landing. Through the reinforced door, I could see the main corridor leading toward the gate room access point. Security personnel ran past, weapons up, faces gray under the emergency lighting. One of them was bleeding from a cut over his eye — shrapnel, probably, from a staff blast hitting concrete.
[HOSTILE CONTACTS DETECTED: 8-12 JAFFA WARRIORS — SERPENT GUARD CLASSIFICATION — ARMED WITH STAFF WEAPONS AND ZAT'NIK'TEL]
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: EXTREME — HOST HAS NO COMBAT CAPABILITY]
The text was almost sarcastic in its precision. Eight to twelve armored alien soldiers with plasma weapons, and my greatest asset was a clipboard.
I watched through the door window. More security teams pushing past. The gunfire intensified, then dropped, then surged again in a pattern that told me the gate room was a mess — overlapping fields of fire, defenders scrambling for cover behind equipment that wasn't designed to stop directed energy.
A staff blast hit something structural. The lights on Level 27 flickered, died, came back at half power. Dust sifted from the ceiling.
"Four dead. Fawkes is probably already gone."
My throat tightened. I gripped the stairwell railing until the metal bit into my fingers.
I couldn't help. I knew that. I'd known it since last night when I ran every scenario and each one ended with a civilian contractor getting vaporized in the crossfire. This wasn't a video game. There was no "reload from checkpoint" if I got my chest melted by a staff weapon. AURORA-7 would die with me, and the entire plan — Kawalsky, the territories, the alliance, everything — died too.
So I stood on a stairwell landing and listened to people die, and I hated every second of it.
---
[Level 27 — 0903 Hours]
The firing stopped.
Not gradually — abruptly, like someone had pulled a plug. One moment the mountain shook with the exchange of ballistic rounds and plasma bolts, and the next there was silence so thick my ears ached from the absence.
Then the Stargate's event horizon collapsed with a bass thrum I could feel through the floor, and the alarms shifted pitch — from active threat to aftermath. The steady wail became a rhythmic pulse: secure, assess, respond.
I moved.
Down the stairwell to Level 28's access corridor. Security teams were transitioning from combat to crisis — medics pushing through with stretchers, officers directing traffic, somebody yelling for fire suppression on the east wall. I attached myself to the flow, clipboard up, contractor badge visible, just another body moving through the chaos.
The gate room door stood open. Scorch marks climbed the walls in long black tongues. The blast door frame had warped from a direct staff hit, the metal bowed inward like something had punched it. Inside, I caught a glimpse of the Stargate — dormant again, innocent, as if it hadn't just served as the doorway for an alien invasion.
Bodies on stretchers. Two covered with sheets. A third moaning, hands pressed against a wound in his side that medical staff were packing with gauze. The smell hit me three steps into the corridor — ozone, burnt plastic, the copper tang of blood, and underneath it all something acrid and alien that had to be residual staff weapon discharge.
[TEMPORAL COHERENCE: 99% — MINOR DEVIATION FROM BASELINE DETECTED]
"Minor deviation. Four people just died and the system calls it minor."
I pushed past a security checkpoint — the airman waving people through without checking badges, too overwhelmed to enforce protocol — and found the medical staging area. Corridor junction, Level 28 south. Triage stations improvised from supply carts and folding tables. Medical staff moving between patients with the efficient calm of people who'd trained for this even if they'd never expected aliens to be the cause.
And there, standing over a wounded airman, directing two nurses with the precision of a conductor leading an orchestra through a firefight: Dr. Janet Fraiser.
Small. Dark hair pulled back from a face that was all focus and no fear. Blood on her gloves, someone else's. She snapped orders without raising her voice — which hand, which side, hold pressure here, get me two units of O-neg — and the nurses obeyed because competence at that level generated its own authority.
"She's supposed to die on P3X-666. Seven years from now. A staff weapon blast during a rescue mission."
I memorized her face the way you memorize a map before crossing hostile territory. Every line, every angle.
Then I moved past and kept looking.
---
Kawalsky was alive.
I found him in the secondary staging area, sitting on an ammunition crate, uniform torn at the shoulder but no visible wound beneath. His hands shook — not from injury but from the adrenaline crash, the body dumping cortisol and epinephrine now that the shooting had stopped. He held a paper cup of water and stared at the far wall with the thousand-yard focus of a man processing violence.
[SGC PERSONNEL IDENTIFIED: MAJOR CHARLES KAWALSKY — NO LARVAL SIGNATURE DETECTED — CURRENT STATUS: UNINFECTED]
The text pulsed twice and faded. Uninfected. The Goa'uld larva that killed him in the original timeline hadn't happened yet — that came later, on Chulak, during the rescue mission that was being planned right now in the briefing room two levels up.
I had a window. Thirty-six hours, maybe less, between now and the moment SG-2 returned from Chulak with a parasite riding Kawalsky's brainstem.
I needed Janet Fraiser. I needed enhanced medical protocols. And I needed them implemented before that rescue team stepped back through the gate.
The intercom crackled overhead, cutting through the aftermath murmur:
"All senior personnel, briefing room, immediately."
General Hammond's voice. Steady, authoritative, the voice of a man who'd just watched his command take casualties from an enemy that shouldn't exist and was already thinking about the next move.
The corridor surged with movement — officers heading up, medical staff consolidating, security teams establishing perimeter. I let the current carry me toward the medical bay, where Janet Fraiser was stripping bloody gloves and replacing them with fresh ones.
My palm stung. I looked down — a scrape across the heel of my right hand, raw and beading red. I'd grabbed the stairwell railing hard enough to strip skin. Good. A legitimate reason to visit medical.
The triage line was eight people deep. I took my place behind a sergeant with a laceration across his forearm and waited. My ears still rang from the staff weapon discharge — a high, persistent whine that turned every voice into something heard through water. The burnt-ozone smell clung to my clothes, my hair, the inside of my nose.
"Thirty-six hours. Find Janet. Make the case for enhanced post-mission scanning. Parasitic vector analysis — biological hazard protocol — anything that gives her a reason to run deep neurological scans on returning personnel. One conversation. One argument. One chance."
The line moved forward. The sergeant bled quietly into a compress.
Across the corridor, through a window into the main medical bay, Janet Fraiser worked on a patient with both hands and every ounce of her training. Focused. Relentless. The kind of person who held other people together when the world cracked open.
I flexed my scraped palm and felt the sting ground me in the moment.
Hammond's briefing would authorize the rescue mission. O'Neill would lead SG-1 to Chulak. Kawalsky would go with SG-2 as backup. Teal'c would betray Apophis and come back through the gate as Earth's first Jaffa ally.
All of that was coming. All of it matched what I knew from a television show that hadn't been a television show for roughly twenty-seven hours now.
But this time, when Kawalsky came home, someone would be waiting with a scanner and a scalpel.
The triage nurse called me forward. I stepped up, held out my bleeding palm, and asked the question that would buy me ten minutes with the Chief Medical Officer.
"Excuse me — is Dr. Fraiser available? I have a contractor safety concern about post-exposure biological protocols."
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