Chapter 4 : CHILDREN OF THE GODS — Part 2
[Medical Bay — Level 25 — Day 1, 1800 Hours]
The triage nurse pointed me toward a curtained bay and told me to wait.
I waited. The scrape on my palm throbbed in time with my pulse — shallow, already clotting, the kind of wound that needed a bandage and nothing else. But the wound wasn't why I was here. The wound was a ticket.
The medical bay operated at controlled chaos. Three beds occupied with wounded from the gate room assault, one airman sedated and intubated, two others stable but pale under fluorescent light. Nurses moved between stations with the mechanical efficiency of trained professionals operating on muscle memory and caffeine. Equipment beeped. Someone coughed wetly behind a curtain two bays over.
Janet Fraiser emerged from the trauma room with blood on her sleeves and exhaustion carving lines around her mouth. She stripped her gloves, dropped them in a biohazard bin, and pulled fresh ones from a wall dispenser in a single practiced motion. Her eyes found me — the contractor sitting in a triage bay with a scraped hand, low priority, almost certainly wasting her time.
"You're the contractor from the electrical inspection?" She checked the intake form clipped to my bay. "Ramsey. What happened?"
"Grabbed a railing too hard during the excitement." I held up the palm. "It's minor. But I actually wanted to talk to you about something else."
She cleaned the scrape with an antiseptic wipe — brisk, efficient, not gentle — and applied a strip bandage. The whole process took forty seconds.
"I'm listening, but I'm also busy."
"I know. I'll be fast." I kept my voice even, professional, the tone I'd used in a thousand Raytheon meetings when pitching unpopular safety protocols to program managers who didn't want to hear about failure modes. "You're going to have personnel returning from an alien planet. Chulak. The rescue mission Hammond's authorizing right now."
Janet's hands paused mid-bandage.
"How do you know about—"
"I was in the corridor during the briefing room announcement. Doesn't matter. What matters is this: your returning teams are going to have been exposed to alien biological environments for an extended period. Unknown pathogens, unknown parasitic vectors, unknown everything."
"I'm aware of the biological risk profiles, Mr. Ramsey."
"Are you? Because the standard post-mission medical is a vitals check, a blood draw, and a debrief questionnaire. That catches bacterial infections and radiation exposure. It doesn't catch something that burrows into the nervous system."
She stopped. The bandage hung from her fingers, half-applied.
"What are you suggesting?"
"Enhanced neurological screening for anyone returning from offworld contact with Goa'uld forces. Deep-tissue MRI of the cervical and cranial regions. Parasitic energy signature scan if you have access to the modified NMR equipment from Dr. Brightman's xenobiology lab." I was guessing on the last one — the show had mentioned Brightman's research in passing, and the system confirmed the lab existed with a flicker of text I kept below my eye line. "The Goa'uld reproduce through parasitic larvae. If one of those gets into a soldier's body and reaches the brainstem, you have hours before surgical intervention becomes impossible."
Janet's expression shifted. The automatic skepticism of a busy doctor being lectured by a civilian gave way to something sharper — professional attention, the kind that processed information for tactical value rather than dismissing it for source credibility.
"The symbiote integration data from Dr. Jackson's initial reports supports a rapid neural colonization model," she said. "But we don't have confirmed cases of—"
"You will." The words came out harder than I intended. I softened them. "The Goa'uld attacked this base today. Your people are going through that gate to rescue hostages from an alien stronghold. The probability of parasitic contact is not theoretical."
She studied me for a long three seconds. Dark eyes, calculating, measuring what I'd said against what she knew and finding the gap between them uncomfortably narrow.
"I'll implement enhanced screening protocols for the Chulak return." She pulled the bandage tight and pressed the adhesive flat. "Neurological baseline comparison, deep-tissue imaging, parasitic vector sweep. It adds ninety minutes to the post-mission processing."
"Ninety minutes could be the difference."
"I'm aware." She peeled off her gloves and dropped them. "Mr. Ramsey, how does an electrical contractor know about xenobiological infection vectors?"
"Because I watched you die on a TV show and I'm not letting that happen to anyone I can save."
"Pattern recognition," I said. "It's what I do."
She didn't believe me. The set of her jaw made that clear. But she'd implement the protocols anyway, because the argument was sound regardless of the source.
"Stay out of my medical bay unless you're injured," she said. "The real kind."
I left.
---
[Level 28 — Gate Room Observation — Day 2, 0300 Hours]
The gate activated at 0247.
I watched from the observation window above the gate room — the briefing room level, technically off-limits to contractors, but the security officer on duty was the same airman who'd waved people through without checking badges during yesterday's triage. He glanced at my clipboard, grunted, and went back to monitoring the gate room feeds.
The Stargate's inner ring spun, chevrons locking with mechanical precision — each chunk vibrating through the floor like a heartbeat. Seven locked. The event horizon erupted, that impossible sheet of rippling blue-white energy stabilizing into a vertical pool of light that defied every law of physics Andrew Callahan had absorbed in four years of engineering school.
SG-1 came through first. Colonel O'Neill, P-90 up, scanning the room before his boots cleared the ramp. Captain Carter behind him, Dr. Jackson third, and then—
Teal'c. Seven feet of gold-branded Jaffa muscle, staff weapon in hand, walking through Earth's Stargate for the first time. The security teams tensed. Weapons tracked the alien warrior until O'Neill barked a command I couldn't hear through the glass.
SG-2 followed. Kawalsky's team, four soldiers plus the major himself, all moving with the tight coordination of a combat unit that had been in a firefight within the last twelve hours.
Kawalsky stumbled on the ramp.
His hand went to the back of his neck — a quick grab, half-conscious, the kind of gesture you made when something itched or stung or moved where it shouldn't. He caught himself, straightened, but the motion was wrong. Stiff. His shoulders locked at an angle that didn't match the rest of his body language.
My stomach contracted.
"It's already in him."
The system confirmed it with clinical detachment:
[ALERT: PARASITIC ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED — MAJOR CHARLES KAWALSKY — LARVAL GOA'ULD — INTEGRATION STATUS: 12% — BRAINSTEM COLONIZATION: NOT YET INITIATED — SURGICAL WINDOW: ACTIVE]
Twelve percent. The larva was inside but hadn't reached the brainstem. Janet's enhanced protocols would catch it — they had to catch it — but only if she actually ran the deep scan, only if the ninety-minute add-on didn't get overruled by a field commander eager to debrief and stand down.
I moved.
The corridor from the briefing level to the medical bay took four minutes at a brisk walk. I took it in two and a half, contractor badge bouncing against my chest, clipboard abandoned on the observation window ledge. The post-mission medical processing had already started by the time I reached Level 25 — SG-1 and SG-2 filtering through intake, grumbling about the extended screening time.
Janet stood at the processing station, datapad in hand, methodically routing each returning soldier through her expanded protocol. Baseline vitals. Blood draw. And then — the addition I'd argued for — a deep-tissue neural scan using the modified NMR equipment wheeled in from the xenobiology lab.
"Dr. Fraiser." I stopped at the medical bay threshold, breathing harder than I wanted to. "Major Kawalsky. He was holding the back of his neck when he came through the gate."
Her eyes met mine. Something passed between us — not trust, not yet, but the specific frequency of two professionals recognizing the same emergency at the same time.
"I saw." She turned to a nurse. "Kawalsky goes first. Full neural sweep. Priority one."
---
The scan took nineteen minutes.
I stood in the observation corridor outside the imaging room, arms crossed, back against the wall, watching through the reinforced glass. Kawalsky lay on the scanning bed, cracking jokes with the technician about the "spa treatment." He looked fine. Sounded fine. The larva inside his cervical spine was eleven centimeters long and burrowing toward his brain at a rate the system measured in millimeters per hour.
The NMR display flickered. The technician stopped laughing.
Janet was in the room in eight seconds.
I watched her face through the glass as she examined the scan results. The color drained from her cheeks, then came back in a flush of professional fury. She said something to the technician — quick, clipped, impossible to hear through the wall — and the room shifted from routine to emergency.
Kawalsky's smile died. He tried to sit up. A nurse pressed him back down.
"Major, we've found a foreign body in your cervical region." Janet's voice carried through the intercom someone had left on. Calm, precise, terrifying in its clinical restraint. "It appears to be a parasitic organism consistent with Goa'uld larval biology. I'm recommending immediate surgical extraction."
Kawalsky's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"You're telling me there's a snake in my neck."
"I'm telling you we caught it early and I can get it out. But I need you in surgery within the hour."
The surgical team assembled in forty-three minutes. I counted every one of them from the observation corridor, fingers pressed against the glass hard enough to bleach the skin white. Two neurosurgeons, an anesthesiologist, Janet Fraiser supervising, and a xenobiology consultant who'd been pulled from bed and still had sleep creases on his face.
[SURGERY IN PROGRESS — LARVAL GOA'ULD EXTRACTION — HOST INTEGRATION: 18% — BRAINSTEM PROXIMITY: 4.2 CM — WITHIN SURGICAL TOLERANCE]
Four point two centimeters. In the original timeline, the larva had reached the brainstem before anyone knew it was there. Kawalsky had died on an operating table after the parasite took control and killed a doctor during the removal attempt.
Not this time.
The surgery ran two hours and fourteen minutes. I didn't move from the observation window.
When Janet emerged, pulling her surgical cap off and pressing both hands against the small of her back, she found me still standing there. She held up a specimen container — inside, floating in preservation fluid, a pale writhing thing the size of a man's thumb, tail thrashing against the glass.
"It's out," she said. "Intact. He'll need recovery time, but the neural damage is minimal."
My knees went soft. I locked them.
[HERO UNIT SAVED FROM CANON DEATH: MAJOR CHARLES KAWALSKY]
[+500 XP AWARDED — "FATE DEFIED" TRAIT UNLOCKED FOR CHARLES KAWALSKY]
[CURRENT XP: 650/1000 — LEVEL 2 THRESHOLD APPROACHING]
"Mr. Ramsey." Janet's voice cut through the system text. "I need you to explain — precisely and honestly — how you knew to look for this."
"I told you. Pattern—"
"If you say 'pattern recognition' one more time, I will have you escorted from this facility." She stepped closer. Five-foot-two of absolute conviction. "A man is alive because of what you told me to look for. You don't get to hide behind buzzwords after that."
My scraped palm throbbed under its bandage. The larva in the specimen jar twisted against the glass.
"I can't explain everything," I said. "Not yet. But I can tell you this — I will never be a threat to this facility, and I will always tell you the truth when it matters."
Janet held my gaze for five full seconds. Then she turned and walked back into the surgical bay.
"General Hammond wants to see you," she said over her shoulder. "Tomorrow morning. 0800. His office."
The tone was neutral.
That was worse than anger.
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