It should have been the best and the brightest, Hammond thought as he stood in the gate room and watched the frightened, tearful procession tramping up the ramp and through the event horizon. But instead they could only evacuate those who had reached the base before the attack began: mostly military, some civilians, a few bewildered children. Politicians, inevitably.
There were plenty on the list who’d refused to go, for whom the dual revelations of extra-terrestrial invasions and Stargates were simply too much to process, and there were others who didn’t have the damn right but were going anyway. Maybourne was top of that list, though the wrongness of it almost choked Hammond. But then, if the colonel hadn’t appeared on the base, sniveling and cowed and all too ready to give up the Alpha Site address, it was doubtful that they’d have been able to save even this many. Hammond took a grim satisfaction in the fact that the man’s hubris had been knocked from him by whatever he’d witnessed topside. There had been no triumph, no I-told-you-so, just a small man desperate to escape. But the sight had offered little real solace.
As for the rest of the politicians, Hammond reserved judgment. They’d better damn well learn to fight or farm, because partisan politicking was the last thing this fragile human outpost would need. It was exactly that kind of scheming that had gotten them here in the first place.
He was still having a hard time accepting that it had been Makepeace all along. The man who had sat in his briefing room and listened to Hammond deliver the bleak sit-rep, knowing the precariousness of their situation in the galaxy and yet saying nothing. He was gone now, a last gasp attempt at redemption perhaps. By Jefferson’s account, it was thanks to the colonel’s sacrifice that Jaffa weren’t swarming through the SGC’s corridors already. Makepeace had bought them time to evacuate, but it was still a bitter pill to swallow and Hammond didn’t think he was ready to forgive him yet.
Far above, something impacted the mountain and the whole base shook. Frightened faces lifted to the ceiling and the pace of the evacuation picked up a notch.
Stargate Command’s power and communications had been knocked out in the first wave; they were operating blind now, limping along on generators. It was barely enough to power the gate. Dust sifted down from the ceiling as the assault on the mountain continued and the dull rumbles and thuds penetrated even into the gate room.
What the state of the surface was like, he dared not imagine. He just prayed that the enemy were concentrating their assault on the mountain, because he had one final role of the dice to make if he could find someone brave enough to take a risk on his last gambit.
All around him, the men and women of Stargate Command prepared to leave, dragging as much kit as they could find into the gate room. Dr. Fraiser was marshalling her own people and it looked like she was trying to send every nut and bolt from the infirmary through to the Alpha Site — God knew, they’d need it all and more. She caught his eye from the opposite side of the gate room and lifted a hand to wave. He nodded, but didn’t disrupt her work. Every second counted. Once the gate shut down there would be no guarantee they could redial fast enough to prevent the Goa’uld from dialing in. They’d been lucky twice; he just prayed their luck would hold a little longer.
“Sir?” He turned to find Colonel Dixon standing at his side.
“Colonel?” Dixon’s Pentagon Strike Team had been parachuted in to oversee the evacuation, so he was surprised to see the colonel still in the gate room. “I thought your team had gone through with the President.”
Dixon nodded. “Yes sir, they did.” He looked uncomfortable. “Sir, requesting permission to stay Earth-side.”
Hammond didn’t know him well, they’d crossed paths only once before, but he knew Dixon was a good man and this request was unexpected. “Why, Colonel? They need you out there on the Alpha Site.”
Rubbing a hand across his face Dixon said, “Lainie, my wife — She’s expecting our first child in a couple months, sir.”
Hammond closed his eyes for a moment, as if that could block out this one small tragedy among so many billions of tragedies. “And you want to be with her,” he said and didn’t add at the end.
But Dixon shook his head. “No sir, she was in DC when the assault began.” His face went tight and hard; they both knew that Washington must have gone already. “I want to fight, sir. I don’t want to run from the bastards.” He jerked his head up toward the skies above the mountain. “There are good men and women dying up there, sir. I want to join them.”
It was a sentiment Hammond fully understood, but sometimes dying was the easy option. He considered Dixon for a long moment, tried to take the measure of the man in the few moments they had together. What did he know about him? He’d served under Frank Cromwell and had led the Pentagon Strike Team since Cromwell’s death here at the SGC. Dixon had an honest face, but it was full of banked rage and grief and he was burning to fight back. He might just be the man Hammond needed to put his plan — worthy of O’Neill in its reckless optimism — into action. “You really want to fight, Colonel?”
“Absolutely, I do, sir.”
“You know we can’t win.”
“We can die trying.”
Hammond nodded, folded his arms and issued the challenge. “What if I said there was something else you could do? It won’t turn the tide — nothing can do that now — but it could save lives. A lot of lives.”
“I don’t want to run,” Dixon reiterated. “Lainie deserves more than that.”
“It means staying on Earth,” Hammond said. “I’m talking about resistance, son.”
He shifted his feet. “How? Doing what?”
“It’s a crazy plan,” Hammond warned. “In all likelihood it won’t succeed and you won’t survive.”
Dixon gave a bleak laugh. “It’s the end of the world, sir. What have I got to lose?”
That made Hammond smile, made him think that maybe his last stratagem might pay off. “There’s a C-5 at Peterson,” he said. “It’s fully crewed and waiting for orders — assuming the base is still standing, of course.” That was the first roll of the dice. “You’ll have to get out of the mountain first and over to Peterson. When you find that bird, I want you to take her to Groom Lake.”
“Area 51, sir?”
Hammond nodded. “Retrieve the Beta gate and its DHD and take them as far away from here as possible. Find somewhere remote — perhaps with one of our overseas allies. Somewhere secret, somewhere no one who’s compromised by the Goa’uld would know about. Get the gate working, keep it working for as long as you can, and send as many people as possible through to the Alpha Site.” He gestured to the forlorn procession of evacuees. “These shouldn’t be the only people with a chance, Colonel. Humanity needs more than them if it’s to survive.”
Dixon’s face had blanched, but he was a good, solid man and he was up for the fight. Hammond might just have laid the salvation of humanity on his shoulders, but he wasn’t going to buckle under the strain. “I’ll make it work, sir. We’ll resist these bastards all the way.”
Hammond nodded. “Yes we will, son.”
“What about you, sir?” Dixon said. “Won’t you come too?”
“No,” he said. “My place is here until the end.”
Dixon took a breath and nodded. “Understood, sir.” Drawing himself up, he offered a sharp salute. “Good luck, General.”
Hammond returned the salute. “Godspeed, Colonel.”
And with that, Dixon turned and started weaving his way through the orderly chaos of the gate room, breaking into a run as he left through the blast doors and disappeared into the emptying base. The dice were rolling now and Hammond knew he’d never find out how they landed, but he had faith in his people — in Dave Dixon and the crew of the C-5, in humanity as a whole. They might be down, but they weren’t out yet. And if Dixon could offer mankind a chance, a way of enduring and fighting back, then maybe these would not be humanity’s final days on Earth. At the very least, Dixon could offer them hope and sometimes hope was the most powerful weapon of all.
Shocked silence filled the room.
More than shocked, Jack thought, it was a kind of breathless incomprehension. How could this man be Teal’c’s young son? His mind felt like it was struggling to change gears, struggling to process something so impossible.
“How?” Teal’c said at last, voicing the question they all shared. “You were a boy when last we were together.”
Dix — or could it really be Rya’c? — nodded. “So I was, but that was close to one hundred years ago.”
Daniel’s breath left his lungs in a rush of disbelief. “What?”
“Oh my God,” Sam gasped.
Jack just pressed his lips together in a hard, skeptical line. Bullshit.
Teal’c seemed to share his opinion. “Why should I accept your word on this?”
“Because it is the truth and you are my father and must know your own son.” Dix drew a step closer, further out of the shadows, and Jack couldn’t deny that the man bore a striking resemblance to Rya’c.
But Teal’c wasn’t convinced. “Your assertion is insufficient,” he said.
Zuri pushed herself forward, chin lifted with an angry cynicism that rivaled Jack’s own. “Dix,” she said, “surely you can’t think these people are really who they pretend to be?”
“I know my own father!” His flare of anger was familiar and Jack was disconcerted to see Teal’c react to it, as if in that unguarded moment he saw the boy he’d known. Rya’c had always been fiery.
Zuri wasn’t cowed, however, and cast her gaze over Teal’c and the rest of them without conviction. “How is it possible that they appear unchanged? This could be a Wraith trick.”
“Yeah, a trick is exactly what this is,” Jack insisted. “If you’re Rya’c, then I’m Rip Van Winkle.”
“Sir,” Sam said quietly, “theoretically it is possible. This wouldn’t be the first time the Stargate has connected with a gate in a different time.”
“And we’ve woken up in the ‘future’ before, Carter, and found ourselves in Hathor’s happy place.”
“But we were unconscious then,” Daniel pointed out. “This time we were awake all along. At least, you guys were, right?”
Jack acknowledged his point with a shrug, although it didn’t really prove anything, and for a moment there was nothing between them all but silence.
Daniel made the most of the opportunity. “Why ‘Dix’?” he said. “Why do you call yourself that and not Rya’c?”
Dix gave a tight smile. “Because ‘Dix’ is a legend.”
“Yeah, we heard. He leads the resistance, apparently. Is that you? Is this… ?” Daniel gestured around them. “Is this the resistance?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.” He glanced at Teal’c. “I adopted the name ‘Dix’ because it has meaning here. I need these people to trust me.”
“By usurping their legends and impersonating their heroes?” Jack said, not bothering to hide his contempt. “Sounds familiar.”
“Huh.” The snort came from Zuri. “You can hardly object to that when you —”
Dix put a hand on her arm, quieting her. “I have done what I must, O’Neill.”
“Oh, I bet you have.”
“Jack —”
“No, Daniel, this is bullshit. All of it.” He turned to Dix. “Look, I don’t know who you people are, or what scheme you’ve got going on here, but you clearly know us and I’m willing to bet you know how to get us back to Earth.” He didn’t raise his MP5, but he swung it around, letting everyone in the room know how this scene could play out. “So if your boss has a Stargate, Dix, then I suggest you take us to it. Now.”
Dix exchanged a silent look with Zuri, before saying, “I understand why it is difficult to believe me, O’Neill, but there is something you need to see.”
“Dix, no,” Zuri protested. “You can’t —”
“I must.” With a serious look at Teal’c, he said, “It is the only way.”
For once, Teal’c’s emotions were easy to read and it was obvious that he wanted to know more about the man who claimed to be his son. Jack couldn’t begrudge him that, even if he couldn’t trust this Dix character any further than he could spit.
Hathor had proven that, when it came to Goa’uld plans for galactic domination, no scheme was too elaborate and no detail too small. But if this was a trick, Jack didn’t know where it started and where it finished. Planet-wide nuclear destruction seemed over-the-top, even by System Lord standards, so whatever had happened to these people — the war, the enslavement, the invasion by the Amam or Wraith or whatever they wanted to call themselves — all of that was real.
The fact was that, wherever — and whenever — they were, their priority was still getting back to Earth. And Hecate’s hat’ak remained their best shot at finding an operational Stargate. So, for now, he was willing to play along and see how far this game took them.
Dix turned and pulled a lantern from its hook on the wall. “Follow me,” he said, his gaze fixed on Teal’c. “Then you will understand.”
As Dix walked from the room, Zuri on his heels, Jack glanced across at Carter.
The unease on her face mirrored his. “What if he’s telling the truth, sir?”
“We’ll burn that bridge if we get to it, Major. For now, let’s just find a way home.” Pushing all other considerations from his mind, he focused on Dix’s lantern as it lit the way through the ruined tunnels. “Stay sharp,” he said as they headed out after him. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
The rubble had thinned out here, and the way was clearer and easier to navigate, but Jack didn’t like how the lantern light bounced off the walls; the shadows stirred something queasy in his gut, a sense that this planet was wrong to its very core. Here and there on the ground, he saw a swathe of the same red paint they’d followed here.
Dix led them onward, until they reached a wide hole in the ground. From somewhere far below, a sound echoed like metal on stone. “Sounds like a dig,” murmured Daniel, but he too seemed anxious as he peered into the darkness of that pit.
“What’s down there?” said Jack, fighting the urge to draw back from the edge.
“You asked me to help you return home.” He gestured to the hole, and Jack saw that a rope hung over its edge. “Now you must trust me.”
They’d come this far and in the end it was nothing, a swift rappel down a long, sheer drop, then an awkward crawl through a narrow gap hewn into a wall.
They emerged into a large cavern, where men and women worked with hand tools, chipping away at the rocks and excavating them in hefty woven baskets. At first, Jack couldn’t understand exactly what it was he was looking at. High above them was a panel with shattered windows, the remnants of some burnt out technology barely visible in the darkness beyond.
“Oh my God,” whispered Carter, her voice stricken in a way that Jack didn’t want to acknowledge. It was a desperate whisper, an awful sound.
“No, Carter…” But the back of his throat was acrid and bitter; he’d seen what was slowly emerging from the tumbled rocks of the cavern.
“The time, sir, the daylight hours. If I’d been able to keep count, I would have known. I would… I would have realized.”
“What is this —?” said Daniel, but his words broke halfway.
Stone by stone, one hammer blow at a time, a curve of gray was being exhumed from its resting place. Familiar symbols gleamed in the torchlight, one of them a two sided pyramid topped by a circle, frozen in time. Frozen for a century, just like the Stargate on which it was engraved.
“You wish to return home, Colonel O’Neill?” said Dix. “You see now why I cannot send you there.”
And in a moment of shock, of shifting reality, Jack’s eyes suddenly made sense of the fractured world around him. They couldn’t go home, because this was home. This was Stargate Command.
This was Earth.