Chapter Text
When two airmen showed up to escort her to an even drabber concrete room, outfitted only with two chairs and a table, Sophie knew the game was up. Then they handcuffed her to the chair. It was bolted to the floor.
She could have gotten out of the cuffs with one of her hairpins, but there were guards at the door. And where would she go?
They let her stew for a good hour or so—impossible to tell time down here—before the general deigned to show up. There was a nasty triumphant look in his eye as he took the seat opposite and dumped a file on the table, flipping it open. Her own face stared back up at her, a damning list of her identities printed in black underneath.
Well. This had been a losing game from the beginning, really. She’d already known they were miles past anything Nate would have considered for plan double-Z.
Nate.
Sophie lifted her chin, and raised her wrist, letting the chains clink. “I suppose this explains the handcuffs.”
“I suppose it explains why you’re so concerned about security breaches,” the general retorted.
She smiled, just a little. “It’s a living.”
“Uh-huh.” His triumphant look darkened, becoming more of a glower. “Now, Ms. Smithe-Patel—or whichever name you want—I can tell you’re a sophisticated, complicated lady. But I’m afraid I’m a very simple man, so we’re going to have to work on my level, here. You’re going to tell us exactly how you got past our security and what you did while inside, and in return, you might not spend the entire remainder of your natural life in a cell.”
Six weeks ago:
“—won’t even let me meet them, Nate, really—”
“Unusual circumstances, I explained that—”
Nate and Sophie’s argument preceded them into the apartment and continued on. Parker, Eliot, and Hardison all looked up warily; there was a belligerent note in Nate’s voice that they’d all learned could lead to genuine nastiness pretty damn quick. It’d been there more often than not since that job last week had gone to hell, and, fine, none of them had liked how that one ended, but it didn’t mean Nate needed to take it out on them.
“Look, we’re all here, can we run this or not?” said Nate, gesturing impatiently at them all.
Hardison raised an eyebrow. “Hey, man, I am good, but even I can’t put together a briefing without a client name, or a target, or even a, a situation.”
“Yeah, well. No client. Our contact is a professional paranoid and I don’t want to spook him in case I need to talk to him again.” Nate remained standing, staring at the blank screens for a moment before he turned. “The target is the SGC.”
The reaction from the younger three was simultaneous:
“Ooooh.”
“What? No!”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
Sophie, her eyebrows now raised, tried to catch Nate’s gaze, but he didn’t look at her. His expression was studiously neutral. “I see you’ve heard of it before.” He gestured at Parker, who was looking surprised, annoyed, and vaguely anticipatory. “Parker?”
“They’re the guys who live under a mountain, right?” At his nod, she continued: “I got hired to do a job once, put a tap on their lines out. Their security was insane! I spent an entire night wrapped up in thermo-reflective foil sneaking slooooowly uphill through a forest—my client and I cooked it up to defeat their heat sensors. And motion sensors. They had a lot of those.” She frowned. “But something tipped them off anyway. I nearly got caught on the way out. With dogs.” Her initially excited expression had settled into sourness. “And then my client disappeared on me without paying up. She disappeared really well, too. I never managed to track her down.”
“Woah,” said Hardison. “Yeah, uh, your client wouldn’t happen to have been called TippleMary78, huh?”
“No. Just Mary.”
“Right. Yeah. It’s probably not her fault she—huh, I didn’t even know she was a she—welched on you.”
“She didn’t pay me.”
“Yeah, ‘cause she went missing and was never heard from again. The SGC? That’s a legend in my circles. Secret government project, billions of dollars in secret funding, kept totally off the public books. You know what they call it in Pentagon memos? Area 52.”
“That Area 52? You wouldn’t tell me about Area 52! What is it? What does SGC stand for? What are they doing with the money?”
“Billions,” said Sophie, not quite disbelievingly.
“I... don’t actually know—no, really, babe, I don’t. A couple years ago people started putting the pieces together that there was something there, started making a go at getting into it, and then, vwoop, vanishing, and I mean gone. TippleMary wasn’t the only one never heard from again after saying they were gonna make an attempt at ‘em, though I didn’t know she tried to get in on the hardline. That’d take balls. Uh, ladyballs. Y’know.”
“You ever try?” asked Nate.
“Yes I did, and I got my ass whooped.” Hardison sat forward and stabbed a finger down at the desk. “I went in through the Pentagon servers—do you know how impressive that is, getting in to the Pentagon’s servers? Most hackers’d be wetting-their-pants-excited at getting that far, but that was just the connection point, here. I got to the SGC firewall and it was out of this world. Like nothing I’d ever seen before or since. I’ve developed a lot of cool shit based off the bits of code I saw that day and I only got a glimpse of it.”
“You never tried again?” asked Eliot.
“Naw, man. They punched right back through my defences and let me tell you, I rabbited and I am not ashamed of that. Got on a plane out of the country that day. Which is why I am the only hacker in the world who’s hacked the SGC and not vanished off the face of the earth.”
“When was this?”
“Couple years ago. During that summer vacation we all took after taking down, uh, IYS.” He glanced at Nate.
Nate was staring at Eliot. “Eliot?”
Eliot grunted. “Why the SGC?”
“Not going to share your story with the class?”
“They’re a government... conspiracy. That’s not our thing. What did your contact tell you they’ve got that you want to steal?”
There was a tiny shift of aha in Nate’s expression. “You’ve worked for them.”
“You worked for them!” said Hardison.
Parker bounced up, eyes narrowing accusingly. “You worked for them?”
“Yes, alright, I worked for them, and unlike other jobs they bothered to give me an NDA, but that doesn’t mean they won’t just bury us all the same if they find us screwing around with them. This is a job without a client, going up against—” Eliot cut himself off, lowering his voice back to even. “So, why?”
Nate had turned to face the black screens again, hands shoved in his pockets, posture tense.
“Nate?” asked Sophie.
“Medical technology,” said Nate.
Oh. Hardison, Parker, and Sophie exchanged long glances. Eliot... was frowning, doing thinking of his own.
“The SGC, as it is known—”
“Never even figured out what it stands for,” muttered Hardison.
“—has, over the past decade, been developing and... acquiring cutting-edge technology across a number of fields, technology that they are sitting on in the interest of ‘national security’. Our contact used to be one of their researchers. Some of what he’s described is... well. You tell me, Eliot.”
He turned, meeting Eliot’s eyes and holding them, flat and level.
“He tell you what the SGC actually does?” At Nate’s slight nod, Eliot frowned harder. “And you believed him?”
“He took some office supplies with him when he left. They were convincing.”
“Oh, that’s just great.”
“Eliot.” Nate was looking at him like he was trying to turn him inside out with his brain. Eliot shifted in his seat, ran a hand through his hair, and visibly forced himself to stillness. That look of Nate’s could make a person feel like a bug that had been pinned under a magnifying glass, and even Eliot wasn’t always immune. “He talked about research that could cure—anything. Bring back the dead.”
Sophie sat forward. “Nate...”
His expression was very flat, very controlled. “They have functioning prototypes. Is that correct, Eliot?”
Eliot looked down, looked at his hands, looked at all of them. Grimaced. He looked as unhappy as Nate. “Yeah. Yeah, but—it’s not—when I was there, at least, they don’t know how it works, entirely—”
“How can they not know how it works?” asked Hardison.
“—and, there’s side-effects—”
Sophie, looking highly unnerved, asked, “Side-effects worse than being dead?”
“I—well, no,” to Sophie, “it’s complicated,” to Hardison, “but—”
“Are they zombies?” asked Parker. “If people have souls—but they’re dead, and then they’re not dead—” She sounded more upset with every word.
“How do you accidentally make something that can bring back the dead, there’s gotta be somebody who knows how it works—”
“I don’t know, Parker, Hardison, I’m not a scientist!”
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Nate’s voice cut through the discussion, and they all turned back to him. “If it’s being developed, if scientists are looking into it, they’re doing that only under the umbrella of the SGC, where—no, it’s not a priority. They’re more interested in weapons development. Technology that could save countless lives, that could change the world, and it’s wrapped up in so much top-secret tape it’ll never see the light of day, because it’s not a priority.”
“Yeah, well, they do have some pretty important priorities they have to keep on top of, Nate. We can’t just knock that over—”
“Then you think they’re justified? Locking down that technology, you think all the people dying without it are acceptable collateral?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying—look, even if we can take them on, and I’m really not sure we can—”
“You ain’t the only one,” muttered Hardison.
Nate was unphased. “They’re people. They’re all just people, guys.”
“—then they’re people doing a really damn important job! We can’t go in and wreck shit, the SGC has to continue to function.”
“What is it they do?” asked Sophie. “If they’re a military secret—is there some global balance of power thing here?”
“No. They’re—kinda international, there were a couple teams, when I was there. I dunno, that was before all this.” Eliot made a circle in the air with his finger. Before the team. “They—uh.” He cut himself off, looked at all of them again, Nate last. Nate tipped his head forward, a silent order. Eliot grimaced again. “They... fight aliens.”
Four days ago:
Mitchell stuck his head around the doorframe and knocked against the open door. “General?”
Landry looked up and scowled immediately, which was never a good sign. Mitchell could think of two or maybe three recent activities by certain members of SG-1 that might have put that expression there, but he hadn’t thought any of those would have been brought to Landry’s attention. And none of them particularly fit with the result of ordering his team split in half.
“What is it, Colonel?”
He stepped more fully into the room. “Just a question about the mission roster, sir. SG-1 was supposed to be on stand-down this week.”
The scowl intensified. “The IOA moved its next meeting up. And they want it held here. Friday.”
Everything became clear. “I see, sir. Well, I’m sure SG-8 will appreciate having Vala and Jackson’s expertise available to them on, ah, P2N-983.” Jackson, at least, wouldn’t mind doing a low-risk meet-and-greet. Vala... well, that would be Jackson’s problem.
Landry snorted. “I’m sure those two will manage to find excitement somehow. Just so long as they don’t come back through the ‘Gate before the IOA is out of here, I’ll be happy.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotten a heads up that the new rep from India is a real hardass with a bone to pick.”
Great. That meant that the other three members of SG-1 definitely weren’t getting out of this. Carter was way too useful to have around if you needed to intimidate somebody into backing off with the sheer size of her brain. The IOA tended to run hot and cold on their opinions of Teal’c—he was a representative of an alien power collaborating with Earth-based forces, so some of the civvies liked the idea of him, some were intimidated and some were xenophobic—but at least he knew how to read a room and put himself forward or gracefully fade out as needed. And Mitchell was 2IC. No get-out-of-jail-free card for him.
Meanwhile, Vala liked antagonizing bureaucrats too much and found it far too easy to lead Jackson astray, too.
Which, he thought, as the General dismissed him, possibly meant that they were the smart ones, here.
Ten hours ago:
“I’m afraid we do have to ask that any phones and computers be left here. It’s standard protocol to ensure that no unsecured device goes in or out of the base.”
“My assistant’s laptop was already approved,” the Indian representative said imperiously.
“It has no wireless capability and runs the security software that your people provided,” her assistant added, conciliatory by comparison.
“Of course, sir. The sergeant here will scan it in.” The laptop case was handed over, while the two gave up their phones—both with expressions of mild distaste—into secured baskets. Williams locked both and handed the representatives the keys. “For your safekeeping. Now, ma’am, if you could please look into the biometric scanner and not blink—”
“I do know how these things work,” she said, stepping up and not flinching as the red light flickered across her eyes.
The scanner blinked identification:Olivia Smithe-Patel, International Oversight Advisory Representative, Republic of India. Williams suppressed a sigh of relief. Sometimes biometric information transmitted from third parties didn’t play well with their security systems, and he didn’t think Smithe-Patel would have had any patience for a delay. But it appeared that the IOA had its ducks in order this time. In short order, he had printed a badge for her, and then he went through the process a second time with the representative’s assistant. By then, Sergeant Kanroy had finished checking the laptop, and reported, “No signals and it’s got the software, sir.”
“Thank you, sergeant.” Williams looked back at the IOA rep, who seemed extremely unimpressed with this report. “This way through the metal detectors, ma’am, sir.”
The assistant was fiddling with his laptop bag constantly on the elevator ride down, opening and closing it. Williams imagined that if he had to deal with the Indian rep full-time, he’d probably develop a nervous fidget, too, and politely looked away.
Near Level 28, Smithe-Patel finally snapped, “Ravi! Will you stop?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Williams saw Smithe-Patel grab her assistant’s hand, forcibly stilling him.
Neither he nor the airman with them noticed the handoff.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Smithe-Patel, sounding anything but as the French representative held on to her hand just a moment too long. He gave an awkward smile and let go hastily.
Half a minute later, he scratched his ear.
Six weeks ago:
Hardison took a breath. It was another job. It was an insane, amazing, literally out-of-this-world job, except that he was still mostly convinced that Eliot and Nate were having the rest of them on, but if it was real... “Alright, so, where do we start with this? Can’t exactly go in as janitorial staff or food delivery here. Mail’ll be screened...”
“They’ve got hand-print readers at the entrance,” said Eliot. He frowned. “That was eight years ago, they’ve probably upgraded.”
Parker was frowning too, at her laptop screen, where she had the Wikipedia page for Cheyenne Mountain pulled up. Wikipedia. See, Nate, this was what happened when he wasn’t allowed to prep a briefing. “The NORAD base on top was built to be able to go into full lockdown in the case of a nuclear attack. They’re going to have their own air system, fans, filtration, all built to DoD standards—I’m not going to be able to go through the vents.”
“If they’ve got biometric scanning on all the entrances—”
“Entrance,” said Eliot. “There’s only one.”
“Great. One entrance. The biometrics are gonna be stored past that firewall. I can’t get through that, Nate.”
“Ah. But how does it get past the firewall?” Nate stood up from the desk, walking around it and over to the bar. “Information goes into that mountain, and it comes back out. They’re told who they should let in, who they shouldn’t. If we can’t scout inside the mountain, we scout around it, and then we make ourselves look like something they want to let in.” He looked over at Sophie and winked.
“I’ve never played a member of the US military before,” she said, intrigued.
Nate shrugged. “You might not have to, we’ll see how the options work out. This isn’t eight years ago. Their program’s expanded since then. It’s not as insular. They’ve got more international contacts, they’ve got more bureaucracy—they have people who go in and out, who aren’t there all the time.” He looked back to Hardison. “Those people, they’re our way in.”
“And our way out? They’ll be scanning everything going out, they’re gonna notice if we’ve grabbed a hard drive,” said Eliot.
“Oh, I have faith in Hardison’s ability to transfer data once he’s got access to it.” Nate smiled. “The tricky part will be the prototype. They have two on base. We’ll be taking one with us.”
Eliot shook his head. “Won’t work. Are you kidding? It’s called a ‘sarcophagus’ because it’s the actual size and shape of a sarcophagus. No way are they gonna let us walk out the door with a giant crate.”
“Depends on the door. Depends on what they see.” Nate had on one of his very smug expressions, high on his own cleverness, a drink in his hand. Eliot scowled. “There is, actually, a second way out of the mountain. They don’t like to use it much, but sometimes circumstances call for extraordinary measures.”
Ten hours ago:
“So this is the place where it all, eh, happens, hm?” asked the French rep, peering around with undisguised curiosity. “And that is the actual... Stargate.”
“Yes, sir,” said Landry. “I thought you might want to see—”
He was interrupted by the Indian representative pushing forward, notes of both alarm and scorn in her voice: “This is... what is this all running on? These computers all look like they were built in the 80s!”
“The hardware was assembled for purpose—”
“Our nations pour all this money into this program and—what are you spending it on, if this is the control room?” She gave him a look of angry disbelief. “This is the front line and your security is based on technology decades out of date—”
“The programs they run, ma’am, are—”
“Sergeant—you are a Sergeant? You operate this—no, General, I wish to hear it from him! The programs you run, here, how do they stay up to date? Old programming is notorious! It is—”
“See, I have had this concern all along,” muttered the Russian rep.
“And they have not addressed it yet?” she asked incredulously.
Landry found himself very calmly explaining how the computers ran ten million dollar custom-built software, and were backed up by multi-parallel advanced processing units, and no, they weren’t state-of-the-art, because they had to be proven to not suddenly fail, ever. The Indian rep kept talking to Sergeant Harriman as if for confirmation, which was annoying as hell, but Landry wasn’t going to call her on it, not yet. Something about the way this argument was playing out told him that whatever her agenda was, this wasn’t it, not really. This was a test, an opening feint. He kept his cool, even when she started dragging Captain Maguire into the questions, too.
Outside of the argument, the Chinese rep and the French rep both looked uncomfortable, though the Chinese rep was better at putting a stoic face on it. The French rep shrugged, finally, and shuffled over to the other operator on duty, Sergeant Harris. Landry couldn’t hear the question in its entirety, but he thought the French rep asked something about whether Smithe-Patel had any kind of point. Harris—calm, collected, experienced—could be depended upon to provide a good answer. The Chinese rep stepped closer to hear the conversation.
What Landry didn’t notice was that nobody was facing the gateroom anymore. But then, the ‘gate was inactive, and there were plenty of alarms that would go off if that changed. A deactivated ‘gate didn’t need to be watched.
Therefore, nobody was looking when a woman in a labcoat and a man in unmarked BDUs dropped down from the ceiling, landing behind the Stargate. It only took them a handful of seconds to unbuckle their harnesses and kick them under the support structure, and then the woman clicked a remote and the ropes retracted. With only a glance at each other for acknowledgement, the intruders strolled in opposite directions out of the gateroom doors.
There was a ready-room beside each door, with soldiers prepared to pour out and cover the entryway at a moment’s notice if the ‘gate was activated—but, of course, it wasn’t. When the ‘gate was inactive personnel did go into the gateroom semi-frequently for maintenance, scientific readings, or to grab equipment that had gotten left behind. Anyone who had authorization to access Level 28 had authorization to be in the gateroom. The intruders therefore went unchallenged, and, in fact, were completely disregarded and forgotten about by the soldiers who did see them passing.
“We’re in,” Parker muttered, subvocalizing as she strode down the hall.
In the control room, the Indian rep continued the argument for another minute before grudgingly allowing the tour to resume.
Six weeks ago:
“Is this an alien computer?”
“I did say our contact took home some office supplies.”
“This is an alien computer.” Hardison ran reverent fingers over the burnished metal. “I’m touching an alien computer. A computer made by aliens.”
“Think it might help you get past the SGC’s firewall?”
Hardison managed to tear his gaze away long enough to give Nate a wide-eyed look. Any indignation at the ridiculously monumental nature of what Nate was oh-so-casually asking for was drowned under awe and wonder. Nate had gotten him an alien computer. Hardison grinned, gleeful. “I have no idea!”
Ten hours ago:
Landry climbed the stairs up to the conference room wearily. The Russian and Indian reps had been snippy at every turn, and that was just the tour. Once they were all sitting down the knives would really come out. He glanced over at the Stargate, visible through feet of bulletproof glass. This was what was at stake, here. This, and all it represented for Earth’s safety. He could handle some pushy bureaucrats.
He stopped in his tracks as he opened the door and a faint but very distinctive bathroom odour wafted out. Really? Today of all days, there had to be some problem with the vents?
For a moment he was tempted just to make them all sit in it.
But while deliberate provocation had its place, in this instance he couldn’t see any way it would actually help him. He turned around, smiled, and ushered the representatives downstairs and toward the elevators, collaring an airman on the way and ordering him to get maintenance up there. They’d use one of the secondary briefing rooms on Level 24.
Five weeks ago:
“Don’t think I’m not seeing the big missing piece in these plans you’re cooking up,” said Sophie, sitting down beside Nate with a glass of wine. He was nursing a glass of scotch, himself, and making notes in the execrable scribble that his handwriting devolved into when he wasn’t bothering to make it readable to anyone else. Sometimes—often—she was sure that he wrote that way on purpose.
“Oh?” he murmured, not looking up.
“We’re none of us scientists. Not even Hardison with his new toy.” She glanced over to the far end of the room, where Hardison had been living for the last week. There’d needed to be two interventions already just to get him to eat and shower. “We steal this piece of alien technology because they’re not researching it, but turning it into the something the public can benefit from—how are we going to do that?”
“One step at a time. Our contact”—Nate considered, and then grimaced faintly—“okay, he’s a bit paranoid, but he’s a place to start. We find other researchers, ones not connected to the SGC, set up somewhere they can work—it’s not like we lack for funding, Sophie.”
“That easily? Even our personal fortunes—which I hope you’re not suggesting we use—can’t stand up to the billions that real medical R&D companies spend every year on new products. This is alien technology, it’s got to be more complicated than the next flu vaccine.”
“Then maybe we go out and steal a real medical R&D company.”
“That is way too risky.”
“Depends on what we can find to hold over their heads—look, all of this, it’s in the future.” He waved a hand, setting down his pen. “Until we have the sarcophagus secured, it’s too far out, we can’t plan for it. There’s too many things—we might find other stuff in their labs. They might catch us on camera and we have to relocate to Kazhistan. No. We get the sarcophagus, we see where we’re at, then we move on to stage two.” He paused to take a drink, and then went back to work.
Sophie looked at him, trying not to frown. Hardison hadn’t been the only one trying to work himself to death in the last week. Nate was obsessing over this—just like he always did on cases related to medical care. The way their last job had gone down had no doubt made it worse, but—but what if this took months? Or years? Nate might be expecting miracles, but that didn’t mean he’d get them right away. If he expected them to babysit some greedy pharmaceutical company and make sure they didn’t run off with the priceless alien artifact...
One stage at a time, she told herself. And later, if she had to slap some sense into Nate, she would.