Stargate SG1 Fan Fiction ❯ The Secret Life of a Major General ❯ Chapter 21 ( Chapter 21 )

Chapter 21

Bridge of the Samantha Carter, Earth Orbit
May 30, 2005
Afternoon

Two goa’ulds and hosts materialised on the bridge of the Asgärd vessel. Having been plucked unceremoniously by the transport beam from their chairs they plummeted to the floor onto their butts. Faces full of anger they scrambled to their feet. Their anger quickly turned to poorly concealed fear upon confronting the distinctive form of an asgärd.

“What is the meaning of this?” Oceanus demanded of the dark skinned alien.

“You will find out soon enough,” Hel promised darkly as the two goa’ulds suddenly found themselves levitating off the floor.

Spindly fingers adjusted a few stones on the console and the human bodies were bathed in light. The strongest point of light concentrated around the head and neck. As the light faded, the humans were again dropped unceremoniously to the ground.

Hel turned another stone and with another flash of light, the serpentine bodies of the two goa’ulds were floating in the air before her. The beaming method of extraction would be fraught with difficulty for any other vessel with a high possibility of leaving the host mind brain damaged, but the Samantha Carter had unusually powerful and discriminating beaming technology.

Casting a dismissive look at the two humans, well aware of O’Neill’s unfavourable opinion and her own—formed after accessed the human’s investigative results, which had revealed the female’s voluntary association with the Goa’uld and the male’s idiotic opposition of O’Neill—Hel beamed them back to the rooms they had been occupying on Earth.

Eyeing the two symbiotes that were still levitating Hel turned back to finish the program she had been constructing. While the main concept was O’Neill’s she found it very suiting to use the Goa’ulds own ideas—not technology as Asgärd technologies were far more sophisticated—for interrogation.

Programming and construction of the necessary devices complete Hel transferred the floating symbiotes into two cylinder shaped tanks filled with the necessary solution that would permit the goa’ulds to think only of the truth. The transparent material of the tank walls was imbedded with the necessary microscopic technology to translate their neural impulses to a projection screen and into English.

It would take a few hours for the truth solution to permeate every cell of the symbiotes but she had time. O’Neill would contact her when he was ready to board Samantha Carter and in the mean time, she would further refine her other project.

The project that would allow for a download of the goa’uld minds into an interfaced database to be searched at a user’s leisure. The goa’ulds were about to learn that some Asgärd had only been restricted from interference by their own laws and their ongoing war with the replicators. The replicators however were defeated and the Asgärd-Goa’uld Treaty had been violated by the parties’ involved—human, asgärd, and goa’uld.

As such, the goa’ulds no longer had the treaty’s protection and were in for a rude awakening.

Colonel Thomas J. Masiello—for the first time in his long and distinguished career with many years of service and then command at DET 3 and the unusual alien situations that the base encountered and produced—felt the closest he had ever come to tearing his greyed hair out as he stood behind his desk.

First had been the kidnapping of Colonel Carter while under his command and whose contributions and importance to the Stargate program were immeasurable. Her permanent loss would have been a career-killing incident to put things mildly.

Next had been the commandeering of his base and resources by the Head of Homeworld Security, which in his opinion was far more terrifying than President Hayes taking over. The president after all was one that would order a body killed and buried, the general would do the killing and burying himself.

Lastly, once General O’Neill’s mission was complete in Las Vegas and the AF had secured the goa’ulds that had been living at the Luxor Hotel they had been snatched right off his base!

Then returned! Minus the goa’ulds!

And the general standing in a corner of his office was entirely too suave about the latest development of the situation.

“You’re certain those power bursts matched the energy of an Asgärd transport beam,” Masiello questioned the lieutenant colonel in front of him.

“It almost matches exactly in power and matches exactly in description,” Carter admitted.

“Almost?” Masiello pressed.

“Yes Sir, almost.”

“So you can not say with certainty that it was an Asgärd.” It was more a statement than a question.

“Not with one hundred percent certainty. But that difference may come from its ability to penetrate the base’s shielding.”

Masiello gave a tired sigh as he scrubbed his hand through his hair. That was a point he did not want to think about. He had been assured by the scientists that no ring or beam technology could be used on or within the base facility. “But you’ve already said that the Asgärd have never… de-goa’ulded a human before,” he pointed out.

“To my knowledge they have not Sir. Thor’s Hammer on Cimmeria kills the symbiote to free the host of infestation. That leaves behind a distinctive marker that neither Kinsey nor Mayfield have. But the time between Mayfield and Kinsey’s disappearance and reappearance indicates an incredibly quick extraction,” Carter thought it prudent to add. “The Tok’ra procedure takes a good forty minutes of preparation and fifteen or more for the actual removal of a symbiote.”

Which was definitely longer than the six minutes the two former hosts had been gone.

“Sir?” an airman tapped on Masiello’s door, standing even more rigidly at attention when he caught sight of the two-star standing in the corner of the office.

“Yes Lieutenant?” the colonel asked.

“The doctor would like you to know that Mayfield and Kinsey have awakened.”

“Good,” Masiello gave a curt nod as he began to move to the door, taking note that General O’Neill held Carter back for a few moments, to question her personally about her ordeal he assumed before his mind turned back to the matter at hand. If the two former hosts were coherent enough, they might be able to get an answer to this question of whether or not it had been the Asgärd that had beamed them off base. If they had been aware of anything at all.

Three hours later Masiello was satisfied with the preliminary interview with Kinsey if not a little disgusted with the interviewee himself. While Kinsey had been infested against his will when the US and Russia had almost launched nukes at each other some months ago, it was the former vice-president’s long association with first the NID and later the more shady splinter group called the Trust, that in the end had led to Oceanus’s inhabitation of his body.

Once infested, Kinsey had been in the dark about Oceanus actions and only occasionally aware of events—like when Oceanus escaped from Osiris’ personalised teltac before Prometheus blew it up, and when the goa’uld took the time to torment his host with certain thoughts. Oceanus had seemed to take particular delight in taunting Kinsey with O’Neill’s successes: such as his promotion, reassignment, and other things.

Masiello suspected Oceanus had done it simply because Kinsey regarded O’Neill as his nemesis even when it was clear to him, that Kinsey was not in the same league as General O’Neill.

Kinsey did not know why Oceanus had kidnapped the general’s children—he had not even known until asked during the interview that the major general had children—and Colonel Carter. Or what the goa’uld might have been planning with Mayfield’s goa’uld named Athena.

Or anything of real use in regards to the goa’uld’s plans and motives. Kinsey was however a wellspring of information in regards to the Trust—even with his information being months out of date—it would at least tell HWS where to look and at who to look when they started their clean up.

Murmuring pleasantries as he took his leave of Kinsey, Masiello fortified himself for what he expected to be a far more difficult conversation with Athena’s former host, Charlotte Mayfield. Mayfield they had uncovered had been a Trust operative before willingly becoming a host.