Stargate - Star Trek Mashup

Chapter 1

March 3^rd, 2058

     “The transfer couplings are worthless.” Averi Freedhoff pointed at the small, dull matte gray metal coil-and-cup sitting on the wooden bench. She stood next to a much taller man at the table, staring balefully at the assortment of parts spread across a bench top. Both were attired in ragged clothing, with elbows and knees patched haphazardly, and the scavenged components were much the same, brought together from various sources in hopes of re-purposing them into a greater whole.

     The trailer around them, in contrast, was well-maintained. While the center was given over to the large work bench, the walls were covered in electronics gear. A plate bolted to one of the few open spots proclaimed it to be an US Army mobile command and control unit, with a date twenty-five years before.

     It was obvious that many of the original components had been upgraded or replaced. A limited AI computer that rivaled many of the units used in the corporate enclaves provided Freedhoff some necessary support but would answer no queries about anything other than its core functions within that trailer.

     Freedhoff brushed a lock of curly red hair out of her eyes. “I can get these to carry power, but they won’t sustain the energy load you are projecting,” she said. “If we could access some D-215 air-frame components, or similar, we could be in business.”

     The other studied her with bright eyes, weighing a response.  Freedhoff tried to brush aside the anxiety that she felt. She was auditioning for a job she knew nothing about in front of a man that was officially dead.

The door opened and Lily Sloane stepped into the trailer, rubbing her hands together. “Z, you wanted me to remind you…”

     “Right,” Zefram Cochrane said, with a glance back at Freedhoff. “We might have something better, eh?” He grabbed the long, fur lined coat he favored and rushed into the nighttime cold. She stared after him until Sloane sighed and motioned her forward.

     The wooded hills around the compound were fir and spruce, the result of reforestation efforts around the compound during the last fifty years. Electric lights were spread among them, marking the paths between the various other labs and down to the crown jewel of the compound – the old concrete missile silo.

     Cochrane’s long legs carried him forward at a rapid pace, forcing the two women into a run. 

     “Slow down, man! I ran this way already,” Sloane managed to gasp out.

     Cochrane jerked to a halt and turned. Sloane slowed and took a few, deep breaths, wincing at the air’s bite.

     Freedhoff looked between them. “Where are we going?”

     Two weeks since her arrival had not given Freedhoff a real sense of the project she had joined. When approached by Sloane within the Boston enclave, she had been told that it dealt with energy source development, a critical need in a world torn apart by war, environmental damage, and disrupted supply chains. The fact that it evolved around a re-purposed Titan missile, snug in its silo, had nearly led to her departure. Sloane had assured her that a revolutionary and peaceful way of using its components was their goal, all in pursuit of a grand dream that would change everything.

     His dream. Freedhoff had discovered that the physics prodigy and legendary intellect of twenty years previous had not succumbed to some disease or premature burn out, or any number of other personal disasters that had been rumored. Instead, he had taken on a new, very long-term project.

     The secrecy was understandable. Compartmentalizing information until she was fully vetted was a reasonable security precaution. It was also incredibly frustrating. While honored that Sloane had brought her aboard, the hints and shortened conversations around the few primary staff she had encountered had left her feeling disoriented and uncertain of her place. Conversations like the one she was involved with now.

     “Dr. Cochrane….”, she said.

     “It’s Z,” Cochrane said. “We are going to see the artifact.”

     “And that is...”, she prompted.

     He raised his hands. “Sorry, but you have to see it!”

     Cochrane turned and walked around the side of a small hill, with the others following. He seemed to slide out of sight through solid rock, but as Freedhoff approached, she realized there was an entrance artfully hidden in a natural crevice.

Sloane grasped Freedhoff’s forearm and pulled her through the gap into the shadows. Once the door slid shut and her eyes had adjusted, she could see they were at the top of steeply angled tunnel into the earth. The only light came from the lower end where the slope leveled out.

They grasped the handrail and eased their way down, emerging into a dimly lit corridor, where dark green doors opened into sparsely furnished offices. There were people moving around behind tan blinds on the old windows, and she could hear a buzz of conversation.

“Is this the project space?”

A pair of elevator doors stood at the end of the corridor. “This isn’t it”, Cochrane said. He grasped a large round handle where buttons once resided and began to twist it around with obvious effort. The doors slowly began to part, and he looked back at her. “The elevator was broken, and we’ve been too busy to fix it.”

     With his final spin, the doors were open, and Freedhoff could see a cage of metal swaying slightly at the end of a thick cable. Cochrane stepped in, followed by Sloane.

     The platform shuddered and swayed further with the additional weight. “Come on,” he said.

     Freedhoff hung back. “That doesn’t look entirely safe…”

     Sloane threw up her hands. “It’s safe. You wanted to see what we do here? Now’s the chance. If Z says you can come, then get on the elevator!”

     Freedhoff relented and gingerly stepped in, gulping at the motion she started. Sloane toggled a control on the side of the cage, and the cable twanged and vibrated as they slowly dropped through the shaft.

     “It’s only nine stories,” Cochrane said. “The silo blast doors and a maintenance tunnel are on the bottom floor. We don’t use the topside hatch access during the winter. Those ladders get icy and a slip from eighty feet up is fatal.”

     They reached the floor after a lengthy five minutes of descent. Freedhoff bolted into the dimly lit hall. “Where now?”

     Cochrane stepped out into a corridor much like the first one and pointed at a pair of double doors to the right, marked with faded lettering and yellow caution symbols. “The project centers.”

     They passed through an office sized antechamber to the next set of doors. Once those swung open, Freedhoff stopped at the threshold, gaping at the cavernous space before her. “I had no idea this was here.”

     Dozens of vehicles – mostly trucks and a few airplanes – were in various states of disassembly, while numerous work benches dotted the floor. At least three dozen people were spread across the floor, wielding various diagnostic instruments and tools. Dotted throughout the floor were square containers made of transparent aluminum, with conference chairs, monitors and white boards. Two were in use, the occupants of one throwing their hands up in heated discussion.

     Cochrane nodded. “No one has, really. It’s ideal for our work.”

     “I see,” she said. “That work is what?”

     He just grinned. “Meet Dave first.”

     “Dave?”

     “Colonel Kirk, miss.” Freedhoff spun. A man in a faded green jumpsuit had entered the room behind them at some point. Gold eagles adorned his collar, and a worn US flag patch was on his right arm. He smiled and held out his hand. “Head of security. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

     Freedhoff had met other security personnel on arrival, men and women that were whipcord thin and pensive, their eyes continually roving the landscape. Kirk, though, was a different breed. Powerfully built but evincing a calm focus that was unnerving, he seemed capable of parsing through any pretense.

     She took his hand. “You get to herd the cats, then?”

     He chuckled. “That is the best description of protecting a group of geniuses I’ve heard yet.”

     Cochrane plunged across the room, heading for a far wall. It fell outside the perimeter of the lights that shone across the various workstations. The group trailed him, and eventually they could see a massive set of doors and the chains that would pull them apart on immense alloy castors.

     “Third Airborne, originally out of Idaho,” Kirk replied to Freedhoff’s questions. “Stationed at Miles Airbase before the first pulse.” They were walking toward those doors, although Cochrane had already reached them and was fiddling with a panel of lights to the right. “Before this assignment, I was in the California push-back.”

     She nodded. “I remember that the Coalition was fighting hard to keep their invasion going.”

     “Yes,” he said. “Washington pulled me out of the LA efforts, and I was assigned here before the mop up finished.”

     “Lucky you.” She started at the squeal of metal on metal as the doors began to lumber apart. The process was agonizingly slow. Everyone was wincing by the time they came to a halt ten feet apart.

     The older scientist rubbed his hands together. “Here we go!”

     She turned toward Kirk with a questioning glance. He shrugged and started forward again.

     This space was conversely smaller than the previous. In the center of the room was a ramp leading up to a wide metal platform, atop of which was a circular ring-like construct. It was at least ten feet in diameter, and 39 symbols were displayed in bas-relief around the aperture with seven pyramid-like chevrons extended downward from the outer edge. A portable fusion generator stood on either side, with power cables clamped onto the rings edge.

A few hardened data cables snaked across the floor to a small network rack filled with optic cables, tying at least twenty screens arrayed across benches with a square AI cabinet at the center. A metal Faraday cage with a blue-tinged field surrounded it all, with a dozen men and women in white lab coats and green jumpsuits studying the multicolored waveforms and various metrics displayed.

     The small group came to a stop near the ramp. “What is that?” Freedhoff managed.

     Cochrane turned to her. “That, my dear, is the big question.”

     She looked around and noted a larger cabinet to the right, its contents clearly an ad hoc scanning assembly. The primary camera was pointed down at a broken stone tablet resting atop a glass plate. Freedhoff knew that type of system well and drifted in that direction.  

     “Excuse me,” Cochrane said. No one responded. Sloane lifted two fingers to her mouth and whistled. Everyone started and stared at her. She pointed at the project head.

     “I would like a full briefing in an hour, folks. Gather your notes, thoughts and whatever else you need and meet me in the main conference room.” He turned but stopped when Sloane coughed loudly. “Ah, yes.” He spotted Freedhoff peering at the tablet and waved in her direction. “This is Averi. She works for Lily.”  He turned and strode toward the larger project area.

     Sloane approached Freedhoff with evident curiosity. “So,” she said, “what do you think?”

     The scientist chewed on a loose strand of hair, her eyes roving over the worn and barely visible glyphs highlighted in the soft light within the cabinet. “This is incredible. Where did these come from?”

     “The big artifact and the tablet were found over a century ago in the Middle East. More recently, we found it in a Nevada bunker.” Sloane shrugged. “The main team is more familiar with the history. I’m just interested in its metallurgical properties.”

     “I took a course in archaeology, and I don’t recall any mention of this.” Freedhoff gestured toward the ring.

     “Well, it could be because it isn’t from here,” Sloane said. “I am sure they hid it for a reason.”

     “The US?”

     “It’s not from Earth. The element it’s built from isn’t on the periodic table.”

“Somehow, I’m not surprised. Do you know what it’s for?”

“It’s a power sink, for starters.”

     “What does it do with the energy it absorbs?”

     The other shook her head and gestured towards the knot of people gathering papers and tablets around the computer stations. “They are trying to figure that out. That’s your job, now, too.”

     Freedhoff grinned. “Thank you for that.”

     Later, she sipped at a passable cup of coffee in the conference room outside the main project center while listening to the primary  team update Cochrane and Sloane. The briefing proceeded quickly through the physical analysis, expounding on the energy absorption, and speculating on potential trigger mechanisms for releasing that power.

The wall screen displayed various images of the ring, including those of its discovery near the Giza plateau in Egypt a century before. Where an intricately carved sandstone capstone was in place at that point, another image showed the ring in a military bunker sitting against a wall, with a concrete cover.

     The young technician speaking wrapped up his presentation. “We are still trying to determine the significance of the ring glyphs.” He looked at his tablet. “Finally, thanks to this new element, an updated periodic table will be forwarded to everyone’s inbox for review.”

     Sloane picked up her computer tablet, its screen displaying the stone tablet, the hieroglyphs clearly shown and partially translated text shown below. “Dr. Artigue, if the AI translated this correctly, this is a warning. Do you concur?”

     A smaller, bespectacled older man shifted nervously in his seat. “Yes, it is a warning not to disturb the ring. Angry gods and all of that.”

     “Could there be a different explanation?”

     “Well, some of us have wondered if there could be a clue to the charge limit and a discharge trigger encoded in the metaphor.”

     “The metaphor?”

     Artigue nodded. “Given the obvious non-terrestrial material involved, it’s possible that there might be a bit of credence to previous theories about aliens being mistaken for deities.” He reached down and pulled a book encased in plastic out of his bag. “There were a few books about pyramids and aliens in the 1990’s by Daniel Jackson, a prominent archaeologist of the time.” He chuckled nervously at the stares of disbelief and shock.

     “Wow.” Sloane shook her head. “That was unexpected.” She looked around the table. “The reference to the gods could also have a deeper, technological meaning. Coordinate with Averi and see if Jackson’s theories are of any help here.”

     Cochrane turned to Sloane and Freedhoff. “If we can figure out that discharge trigger...”

     “We might have a coil capable of sustaining a field,” Sloane replied.

     Freedhoff looked between them. “What field?”

     “Time for some light reading,” Cochrane said, handing her one of the tough little system tablets they used within the project.

     Like many of the compound residents, she later found herself at the community meeting spot and bar near the silo. It was a thin tin roof supported on a dozen poles, providing shelter from rain or sun. The long bar had an impressive rack of liquor and a working beer fridge and provided a diversion for the isolated workers. It was manned throughout the day on a rotating basis by a bevy of volunteers as a break from the drudgery in the project bays.

     The jukebox was playing full blast. It had been discovered remarkably intact in an abandoned diner south of the compound, and its restoration was Cochrane’s pet project. Sloane claimed that the eccentric genius had worked out a few additional kinks in his field theories the night Roy Orbison started playing.

     Trying to ignore the noise, her whiskey sour long finished, Freedhoff read through the full text of Cochrane’s foundational theories on her tablet. She attempted to reconcile its contents with what she had learned in her graduate studies but some of it was indecipherable. Everyone she had met seemed to be excited by his work, so she would take it on faith that it all seemed feasible.

     Somehow, he had leapt decades ahead of everyone else and pulled together a theory of physics that just might deserve the appellation ‘unified’. If he succeeded in generating the space and gravity bending field he proposed, it could transform everything.

     “Wow, you look befuddled.” Kirk appeared and sat on a stool next to her, grinning, glass in hand. “So now you know.”

     “Now I know,” she agreed. “A missile converted into a faster-than-light spaceship and an alien ring.”

     “Yeah.” Kirk swirled his glass around, watching the cubes shift. “I don’t pretend to understand the science,” he said, “but I’ve seen enough that makes me doubt mankind’s suitability to be a positive influence out there.” He glanced up at the roof with a haunted expression. “If we do make it there, then us warlike, environment destroying humans need to be something different.”

     “Wow. That sounds kind of deep. Didn’t I see that in a vid somewhere?”

     “Could be.” He shook his head with a smile, then slid away from the bar and offered her a quick salute.  She watched him walk over to Cochrane, where their erstwhile leader slumped on a table with an empty bottle and a few glasses for company. Kirk bent down, slid the doctor’s arm over his shoulder and helped the taller man toward the nearby tin and wood Quonset hut that served as his sleeping quarters.

     The next day, the conference room became her temporary office. With space at a premium on the project level, Freedhoff was reluctant to disturb the routines of the other scientists on staff. Tablets and papers were scattered about. The large wall screen displayed the ring, its 39 symbols displayed in high contrast for easier viewing.

     Artigue – she learned his first name was Garret – showed her how to use the table computer link. He also summarized Daniel Jackson’s book for her.

     “So, he thought that the pyramids were landing pads for alien starships?”, she said.

     “Yes. He was ostracized after that. Plus, no one saw him after 1989,” Artigue said.

     “He just disappeared. That’s odd.”

     “Well, most of his peers thought he went into hiding after his theories were rejected. His parents died at an early age, so he was a bit of a loner anyway. I wish he were around so we could tell him he was right.”

     “That is a bit of a leap, don’t you think? We don’t have any evidence of alien star-ships….” Freedhoff stopped and stared at the screen. “What if that’s it?”

     Artigue stared at her. “Ummm, what?”

     She ignored him and moved her hand over a small display pad. Her movements there were translated into corresponding screen moves. The ring rotated and stretched as she sought a different perspective.

     Freedhoff jerked her hand back, locking the symbols into place. She pushed away from the table and paced around the room, her eyes intent on the screen.  Finally, she turned back and triggered a keyboard on the pad. Her fingers moved over the displayed keys rapidly, and the AI symbol flashed in the corner as it began executing the entered commands.

     “Keep an eye on it, please,” she said. She turned and marched into the hall, steering toward the larger project center.

     Once through the doors she found Sloane near a disassembled air frame, parsing through titanium sheets they had liberated from the interior. “Sloane, I found something,” she said.

     Minutes later, both Sloane and Cochrane were standing in the conference room with Freedhoff and Garret. All regarded the screen and altered symbols. While Sloane exhibited a confused interest on her face, Cochrane’s eyes widened. “Wait. Is that…”

     Artigue threw his hands up in excitement. “Yes!”

     Sloane directed an irritated glance at him. “What are we looking at?”

     The others exchanged knowing grins. “Stellar drift,” Cochrane said, “shifts the star patterns we see over the millennia.”

     “I know that”, Sloane replied.

     Freedhoff nodded. “I had the AI plot historical star alignments and match any known patterns to the symbols on the ring.” She paused and drew a shuddering breath. “Let me present the constellations in the Earth’s night sky...one million years ago.”

     Two days of review and research followed. Freedhoff took the time to review both the metallurgical analysis of the ring and Jackson’s work in more detail. Artigue disappeared into the archive room where he communed with the base AI over twenty-four hours without sleep. Kirk reappeared and rebuffed any questions about his absence, spending time with Cochrane in a heated discussion.

     Finally, the core team – Cochrane, Sloane, Kirk, Freedhoff and Artigue – were gathered around the large conference table again. The wall screen now showed a black background filled with star patterns as seen from Earth one million years previous, the ring symbols overlaid atop the ancient constellations.

     Garret was obviously excited, literally bouncing on his feet.     “As soon as Averi worked out the constellation representations, we had the AI do a deep dive on what we had believed to be non-related data from the Nevada site where we had located the artifact. It had been tagged within folders regarding stellar observations, which doesn’t align with metallurgical analysis. There was evidence of phage damage in some of the historical records.” 

    He tapped on the data pad in front of him and turned as the screen began to display a highly pixelated, grainy black-and-white film. “This is from the US Army sometime in the nineteen-forties. As we don’t get a better view of the environment, we’ve assumed they are in a secured bunker or laboratory.”

     Their ring was at the center of the view, with cables attached from an out-of-frame power source. They watched, spellbound, as a pair of soldiers manually pulled on the ring, spinning the inner ring until a single symbol aligned with the upper chevron. That seemed to light up, descend and reverse to its starting position rapidly, which allowed the ring to spin again. After seven chevron movements, a strange bubbling energy seemed to surge from the center of the ring into the room. It then drew back and settled into a shimmering, water like boundary within the aperture of the ring.

     Someone entered their view, adorned in what appeared to be an old-style diving suit, trailing a long hose, presumably intended for air. He walked into the ring, into the boundary…and disappeared. After a few moments the ring surface cleared away and the hose fell to the ground, cleanly sliced through at the point it had entered the ring.

     The film ended and the screen reverted to the starry background.

     No one spoke for a short time. Freedhoff wasn’t aware she had been holding her breath and took a gulp of air.

     “Did the traveler return?” Kirk asked.

     Artigue shrugged. “We don’t know. There were more recent records, but they were heavily redacted, and in some cases, large amounts of material referenced elsewhere was missing. It wasn’t damaged but erased. We know there was an additional mission through the gate in 1989 but nothing else.” He slumped into a chair.

     Cochrane waved at the screen. “That is obviously an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and that boundary is an event horizon.”

     “A wormhole,” Freedhoff said.

     “Correct,” he replied. “Once generated, those symbols provide a means of targeting the other end, sort of like dialing an old-time telephone.”

     Sloane snorted. “So, it’s connecting to another planet?”

     “Another ring on another planet,” Freedhoff said. “It would have to be.”

Chapter 2

June 11th, 2058

    A bleary-eyed Artigue stared at a computer screen. "Try again."

    Freedhoff crouched at the side of the ring device - or gate, she reminded herself - with her hands inside a small hatch. She gingerly touched a pair of electrical probes to hexagonal crystals that comprised the control system.

    "You got it!" Artigue stood and pumped his fist. The assembled technicians behind him began to clap. He rushed over to Freedhoff's side to hand her the boxy adapter, its optics cable trailing back to the network cabinet.

    She pushed the rubbery component over the end of the crystal. "Let's see if we can get some activity."

    Artigue returned to the console. "Herbie, please initiate a connection."

    "Gate link initiated, Dr. Artigue," a smooth voice responded from the inset speakers below the screen. Status indicators lit up in red, followed by yellow, and after a few moments of watchful prayer, green.

    "They're all good." The scientist said excitedly. "It works."

    The isolated AI setup to track gate functions had been dubbed "Herbie" by Artigue in a fit of humor. It's active capabilities did not include communication with the base systems or the outside world, since Herbie's sole focus was to assist the team map out the gate's crystalline circuits. They came to understand those were essentially an advanced version of the silicon composite components used in all sorts of complex Earth systems.

    Building a means to turn the rings mechanically was feasible, but Freedhoff wanted to connect to the ancient device and operate it as close to the original methodology as possible. Artigue had suggested a companion computer of some sort was probably located near the dig site in Egypt, but no information about such could be found in the data files they recovered.

    Sloane pulled all the titanium and transparent aluminum out of her stockpile and built a room around the artifact with a single airlock as an entrance. She had designed to level 4 bio-hazard standards to keep alien pathogens or environmental hazards away from the staff, no one knew how dangerous such interactions could be.

    The initial plume from the ring as shown on the film proved a point of concern. Sloane declared the room sized correctly, assuming that outburst stayed consistent, .

    "It wouldn't do to let the wall get disintegrated on the first try," she quipped. The scientists opted to move the equipment and control mechanisms to the side of the room, away from the gates horizontal 180-degree axis, as a precaution.

    "This'll set me back by months or years," Cochrane lamented. The partially constructed cockpit for the spaceship was pulled apart for its materials, and he toasted its demise frequently at Roy's.

    Freedhoff understood his reluctance to divert resources from the Phoenix, but Cochrane agreed finding the source of the superconductive gate element was a priority as well. It's ability to absorb and channel energy could help their project.

    The seven-point coordinate system proved less of the challenge. A gate network map was not available to the group, but the process of elimination could provide viable destination addresses. Of course, they would start with the address first seen in the old film.

    Kirk was a difficult sell on their plans - he argued against exploration without a greater understanding of the risks on the other side. "I doubt aliens would be really happy about a bunch of humans stumbling into their territory, Z!"

    Cochrane compromised with a security detail always on guard outside the airlock door. He had no desire to appear warlike, but Kirk convinced the project lead it was better to be prepared if the aliens were.

    Cochrane insisted anything they discovered should be a closely guarded secret. Where the older scientist didn't trust the government, the colonel felt it his duty to report the find to his superiors. Only the mandate that placed him under Cochrane's command provided the framework for them to establish operating protocols satisfactory to both. Kirk would call in the cavalry only if they identified any dangers to the planet.

    Now, Freedhoff stood with the rest of the team behind the control console with an unobstructed view of the gate, while Kirk and five security guards lingered nearby. Everyone looked at Cochrane, but he pointed at Freedhoff.

    She stepped forward. "Herbie, what's the status?"

    "Forty-five kilowatts have been drawn from the batteries, Dr. Freedhoff, which the systems indicates is sufficient."

    Cochrane glanced at the screen. "Herbie, please initiate sequence A1," he said

    "At once, Dr. Cochrane," the AI replied. A glyph appeared on the screen with each successful chevron lock. Once all seven symbols appeared on screen, the initial plume failed to appear.

    Cochrane sighed. "Did we do it right?"

        "I wonder if something happened to the original gate they connected to in the film," Freedhoff said.

    "Maybe, maybe not," Artigue said. He patted her on the shoulder before sitting at a station. "Herbie, run a diagnostics on the gate link and search for errors."

June 12th, 2058

    Kirk rolled out of his cot into a standing position. Something disturbed his sleep, and long ingrained military discipline allowed him to transition to full wakefulness in moments. The security team used a side office to rest between their rotating eight-hour watches during forty-eight-hour shifts and he participated in the schedule when his longer layovers at the compound permitted.

    The seashells sitting in a decorative vase on the desk were rattling, and he could feel a slight rumbling under his feet. He kicked his shift partner's cot and grabbed his sidearm off the shelf.

    "Let's go!"

    Kirk checked the nearby camera displays. The gate was spinning, with the first chevron locked. He ran out of the office, across the hall, through the double doors into the project area and sprinted through to the gate controls.

    A young woman sat at the console and stared at the shimmering boundary surface within the inner ring in shock. Kirk took a deep breath and glanced at the nametag on the technicians lab coat. "Jane, what did you do?!"

    She shook her head. "Nothing! It just started. I didn't initiate it."

    He turned to the screens and searched the readouts, which he realized was a a futile effort on his part. "Herbie, what happened?"

    "At eleven-twenty-three and twenty-one seconds the system registered an incoming activation."

    "Can we shut it down", he asked.

    "Negative. The wormhole cannot be disrupted from this end," Herbie replied.

    Kirk spied three of his security personnel running towards their position. He pointed at the technician. "Please call the senior staff." She grabbed a tablet as he walked up to the gate room window, joined by the guards.

    After the visible rush of particles retracted into the watery surface, a single robed figure emerged onto the platform. Kirk first thought it was a tall human with long black hair, then he noted a greenish-tan complexion. 

    The visitor fixed his dark eyes on the team outside the window, lifted his right hand and presented it palm out, splitting his fingers to create a V. Cochrane careened into the control area to stand behind Kirk. 

    "I don't think he's hostile", Cochrane said. He grinned and waved.

    A shorter, muscular woman with long blond hair appeared behind the first arrival. The wormhole entrance dissolved as it pulled away from the center to fade at the edges, and Cochrane reached over and toggled a switch next to a microphone. "Welcome to Earth."

    Chapter 3

    Cochrane and Kirk had stepped through the airlock and the woman had fixed her gaze on Kirk. "You are the leader?", she asked in accented English. Both men stopped in surprise before Cochrane raised a hand.

    "Actually, that would be me", he said.

    The woman leaned over and said something to her companion, who had watched their exchange with a tilted head. He replied in a low, undecipherable language. She faced them again. "We detected your chappa'ai activation attempt. That was unwise."

    Kirk stepped forward. "Our what? Why?"

    The male met Kirk's eyes and spoke matter-of-factly with a flat, emotionless tone in precise, slightly accented English. "The goa'uld monitor such things in their search for new prey. Is this unknown on your world?"

    "We are new to using this technology." Cochrane held out a hand. "Welcome to Earth", he said again. Both regarded the offered hand with curiosity, until he lowered it. "I suppose we have different customs."

    "Indeed. May we enter your facility?"

    "Of course,", Cochrane said. Kirk coughed and the scientist smiled.

    The visitors walked down the ramp to stand before the two men. "I am called Nalia", the woman said. "This is Sovak."

    "I'm Zefram, and this is Dave", Cochrane said. "We've speculated about intelligent life outside our system. This is incredibly exciting for us."

    "To be blunt, however, why are you here?", Kirk asked. Cochrane favored him with an irritated glance.

    Nalia smiled for the first time. "I appreciate directness. I assume you have armed personnel around this room?"

    "You may assume that."

    "Good. Increase your numbers," she said. "We are here to ensure the safety of your world."

June 12th, 2058

    It was just past midnight when Cochrane and Kirk led Sovak and Nalia out of the gate room airlock and past the guards. Sloane, Artigue and Freedhoff followed, leaving the shocked scientists and technicians to their conversations.

    The conference room table was still covered in an assortment of tablets and papers spread across the surface. Freedhoff winced and started pushing those aside as Cochrane offered chairs to the visitors.

    Cochrane pointed at Freedhoff. "This is Averi, that's Lily and there's Garrett." They each smiled and nodded in turn. "I have a lot of questions, but you said something about the safety of our world?"

    Sovak steepled his fingers. "As Nalia referenced, we detected your attempt to activate the chappa'ai. In your language...a star gate. This causes a signal on the galactic network and can be traced by the goa'uld."

    Kirk leaned forward. "Who are they? You said they were looking for prey?"

    "The goa'uld are a parasitic scavenger species. They use these stargates to locate new worlds for contact, where they can infest, invade and conquer." Nalia's voice was harsh. "Their priority are those planets with naquadah, a mineral used in many of their technologies, including the stargates."

    "How pervasive are these goa'uld people?" Sloane asked.

    "We know of at least seventy worlds under their control", Sovak replied. "Many of them have been reduced to pre-industrial levels of economic organization. Their populaces are either enslaved and forced to work in mines or used as military troops. Reading and writing are discouraged."

    Sloane, Artigue and Cochrane all stared at the visitors in horror. Freedhoff placed a hand over her stomach.

    "I guess it's convenient you were the first people we encountered", Kirk said.

    "Caution is warranted," Nalia said. "This galaxy is a harsh place. However, we are with those that resist the goa'uld and all they stand for."

    Sovak touched Nalia's arm. "My ancestral world of T'Khasi has been controlled for millennia. Nalia's world was recently taken," he said.

    "We are interested in preventing the same from occurring here", Nalia said. "A new ally in the fight against the goa'uld would be useful. How soon can we meet your world leaders?"

    The scientists and Kirk all exchanged meaningful glances before Sloane finally spoke. "We've just finished a major war among the Earth nations. Our world leaders are still coming to terms with the aftermath."

    Nalia narrowed her eyes. "How is this possible?"

    "There are a lot of greedy, shortsighted people in charge here", Freedhoff said. She studied the other for a moment. "How is it you both speak English so well?"

    "My great-great-grandfather was Ernest Littlefield. He claimed to be from Earth. It is from him we know your language."

    "The first traveler?" Artigue said.

    "That makes sense," Cochrane replied.

    Nalia offered a wan smile to the group. "He was a great elder on my world and led our resistance for some time."

    Cochrane sighed and looked around the table. "I think we have a lot to consider, but we could all use some rest." He spread his hands looked at Sovak, then Nalia. "It's not much, but we can offer you a meal and a warm bed if you'd like to stay here for the night."

    Sovak's hair fell back from his ears to reveal their upward sweep into pointed tips as he stood. "That would be acceptable, Zefram."