Chapter 2 : THE CALM BEFORE
[Level 27 — Cheyenne Mountain — Day 0, 1400 Hours]
The electrical systems documentation for Cheyenne Mountain's sub-level power grid ran four hundred and twelve pages, and I'd been pretending to read it for six hours.
Not entirely pretending. The technical specs were dense but comprehensible — Andrew Callahan had spent eleven years at Raytheon wading through military infrastructure documents, and the vocabulary translated even if the man didn't. Redundant bus architecture. Emergency diesel backup sequencing. Load distribution across twenty-eight subterranean levels. My pen moved through the margins, flagging genuine inefficiencies I could cite if anyone asked what I'd been doing all day.
But the margins also held other notes, written small enough to look like engineering shorthand. Personnel rotation schedules. Guard changeover at the gate room: 0600, 1400, 2200. Security checkpoint procedure on Level 28 — badge plus escort for non-military, unless carrying a signed work order from the base engineering office.
"You're actually reading that?"
I looked up. Sergeant Siler stood at the end of the corridor workstation, tool belt slung low, a smudge of something black across his jaw. Stocky, early forties, the kind of competence that came from spending two decades fixing things other people broke.
"Shouldn't I be?"
He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.
"Most contractors sign the compliance forms, do the walkthrough, and spend the rest of their contract in the commissary drinking coffee."
"Most contractors didn't see the power fluctuation report from last Thursday." I held up the binder. "You've got a harmonic resonance issue in the secondary distribution trunk on Level 23. It's not dangerous, but it'll degrade your backup switchover time by about four hundred milliseconds under peak load."
Siler's eyebrows climbed. He took the binder, flipped to the page I'd flagged, and read for thirty seconds.
"Huh."
"Yeah."
"That's... actually a valid catch." He handed the binder back. "You want to see the trunk line? I can walk you through the physical layout."
"I'd appreciate that."
We walked. Siler talked about the facility's electrical bones — the original 1960s infrastructure layered under three decades of retrofits, band-aids, and classified modifications he couldn't fully describe but which I could fill in from memory. Naquadah-enhanced capacitors in the gate room power supply. The secondary generators installed after a foothold situation that hadn't happened yet but would. Every detail he mentioned, I filed and cross-referenced against the show's continuity.
The system tracked Siler automatically. A faint line of text appeared at my peripheral vision:
[SGC PERSONNEL IDENTIFIED: SERGEANT SLY SILER — CHIEF MAINTENANCE TECHNICIAN — LOYALTY: N/A — RECRUITMENT POTENTIAL: MODERATE]
I dismissed it with a thought. Recruitment was a Level 2 function, and I was months from that. Right now, Siler was useful for a different reason.
"Listen," I said, matching his pace down the corridor. "I need to file an electrical safety compliance check on the gate room systems. Standard contractor stuff — visual inspection of the main power feeds, verify the grounding schema against spec. I've got a work order but I need an escort."
Siler squinted at me.
"The gate room."
"It's on my contract scope. Power delivery to Level 28 and associated systems." I pulled the work order from my binder — printed that morning from a terminal in the engineering office, legitimate in every way that mattered. "I can submit it through channels, but that takes a week. If you're heading down there anyway..."
He chewed on it for three seconds.
"I'm doing a panel check at fourteen-thirty. You can tag along, stay behind the yellow line, don't touch anything with a radiation warning on it."
"Deal."
---
[Gate Room — Level 28 — Day 0, 1430 Hours]
The Stargate filled the room.
Twenty-two feet of naquadah-refined alloy, standing upright in a reinforced cradle, its inner ring marked with thirty-nine symbols I recognized from eight seasons of television and two feature films. The metal surface caught the overhead lights and threw them back dull, flat, like a mirror that had given up on reflecting. Dormant. Dead weight.
Except it wasn't dead. I could feel the system reacting to it — not through any physical sensation, but through a pressure behind my eyes, a density in the text overlay that sharpened when I looked directly at the ring.
[ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY DETECTED — CLASSIFICATION: ASTRIA PORTA (STARGATE)]
[ANALYSIS: 12% COMPLETE — NEURAL SYNC INSUFFICIENT FOR DETAILED SCAN]
[NOTE: POWER SIGNATURE DORMANT — ESTIMATED ACTIVATION CAPABILITY: FULL]
Twelve percent analysis. At fifteen percent sync, the system could identify the gate but not read it. Like looking at a book through frosted glass — I knew what it was, couldn't make out the words.
I stood twenty feet from the ramp, clipboard in hand, pretending to sketch the power conduit routing while Siler crouched behind an access panel. Two gate technicians worked at the dialing computer across the room, their conversation a murmur of protocols and shorthand. An airman stood guard at the blast door, M16 slung, bored in the way only military personnel guarding a stone ring could be bored.
"Tomorrow, that ring activates. Serpent Guards come through. Staff weapons turn this room into a kill box."
My pen moved across the clipboard. The guard's name tag read FAWKES. He was one of the four who died in the original timeline.
I wrote down the power conduit junction numbers and did not look at Airman Fawkes again.
---
[Drew's Quarters — Level 25 — Day 0, 2200 Hours]
The cafeteria meatloaf sat heavy in my stomach, half-eaten and cold on the desk beside me. Contractor quarters were a step above a broom closet — single bunk, metal desk, shared bathroom down the hall. The walls were bare concrete painted beige, the mattress had the structural integrity of damp cardboard, and the overhead light made everything the color of old teeth.
It was the best meal I'd had since dying.
"This is real coffee. Actual, genuine, somebody-ground-this-from-beans coffee. Not whatever Andrew Callahan was drinking from a Keurig. This is the good stuff."
I wrapped my hands around the commissary mug and let the warmth soak into my palms. Small joys. This body was alive. This coffee was hot. That was enough for right now.
The system text hung in the air above my desk, a crude to-do list I'd been building for hours:
[CANON EVENT: CHILDREN OF THE GODS — T-MINUS 11 HOURS]
[KEY EVENTS: APOPHIS INCURSION → GATE ROOM ASSAULT → 4 KIA → ABDUCTION OF SHA'RE AND SKAARA → RESCUE MISSION TO CHULAK → KAWALSKY GOA'ULD INFECTION → KAWALSKY DEATH (IF UNDETECTED)]
[INTERVENTION ASSESSMENT: SHA'RE/SKAARA ABDUCTION — NON-PREVENTABLE AT HOST LEVEL 1. GATE ROOM CASUALTIES — NON-PREVENTABLE WITHOUT COMBAT CAPABILITY OR AUTHORITY. KAWALSKY INFECTION — PREVENTABLE VIA EARLY MEDICAL DETECTION.]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: ENSURE ENHANCED POST-MISSION MEDICAL PROTOCOLS PRIOR TO CHULAK RESCUE RETURN.]
The logic was cold but accurate. I couldn't save Sha're and Skaara — that required being in the gate room during the attack with weapons and authority I didn't have. I couldn't prevent the four deaths — same problem. But Kawalsky's infection happened on Chulak, during the rescue mission, after the initial crisis had already passed. The larva entered through the back of his neck and burrowed toward his brainstem. In the show, nobody caught it until the parasite had full control.
But if someone — say, a paranoid civilian contractor with valid concerns about alien biological hazards — convinced the base medical officer to implement enhanced scanning protocols for returning personnel...
Dr. Janet Fraiser. Chief Medical Officer. Five-foot-two of clinical precision and moral backbone. In the show, she saved more lives through stubborn medical competence than most SG teams did with P-90s. She'd listen to a reasonable argument about parasitic infection vectors. She might even implement the extra scans without needing much persuasion.
"And if the scans catch the larva before it integrates with Kawalsky's nervous system, they can remove it surgically. He lives."
One save. One thread pulled from the tapestry. The smallest possible change.
I drained the coffee and set the mug beside the meatloaf.
The system pulsed a reminder:
[HOST LEVEL INSUFFICIENT FOR MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS INTERVENTIONS. ONE THING AT A TIME.]
"Yeah," I muttered to the empty room. "I got it."
I set three alarms on the digital watch that came with the uniform — 0500, 0530, 0545. Tomorrow I needed to be showered, dressed, and positioned near the medical bay before the gate activated. Before the screaming started.
The overhead light buzzed. I killed it and lay on the bunk in the dark, staring at a concrete ceiling I couldn't see, running contingencies until my mind spun out and left me with just the hum of recycled air and the distant rumble of a mountain full of people who didn't know what was coming.
"One thing at a time."
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs to stop the trembling.
The watch ticked toward midnight.
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