The phone on Janet's bedside table buzzed at 0411 on a frequency that made the lamp base resonate.
Janet's hand was on my shoulder before I had finished registering the sound. I was already turning. The buzz was the SRD-priority pattern — three short, one long, three short — and Janet had heard it before through the wall in her own bedroom, and she had asked me, two months ago, to set it to its own pattern so that if she ever woke to it she would know what it was.
"Go quiet," I said in my skull.
Wake up.
I corrected.
"Wake up."
Awake.
I sat up. The phone in my hand was already showing the SRD code-three flag. I read the code. I read it twice. Janet read it over my shoulder; her hand stayed on my back.
"Go," she said.
I had not yet asked.
I kissed her forehead. I dressed in the dark in yesterday's clothes from the chair by the bed. She did not get up to walk me to the door. She did not go back to sleep. I heard the bedside lamp click on as I reached the front hall.
I was at the SRD office at 0457.
Walter was at the console. The strategic display was red along a vector that had not existed twelve hours ago. The vector ran to a colony designation I knew by file number and by the names of the two civilians I had spoken to at the formal claim ceremony six weeks ago — a primary settlement of forty-three colonists, a single SGC defense squad of six, a hydroponic farm that was Earth's first off-world food-trial.
"Sir."
"Status."
"First contact at oh-three-fifty-eight, local time. The defense squad held to oh-four-oh-six and lost comms. We have ground-team comm from one survivor at oh-four-twelve and intermittent since. Colony evacuation has not started. Prometheus is the closest asset. Sam Carter is on the bridge. Kawalsky is in the cargo bay with two augmented teams. Jack is running ground at the gate."
"Distance to colony."
"Forty-seven minutes at Prometheus current shakedown speed. Sam thinks she can take twelve minutes off."
"Authorize."
"Authorized." He typed without looking.
The strategic display held the red vector. AURORA-7 came up at the new cadence with the second tactical layer running and the predictive routing saturated past sixty percent. The HUD was incomplete. Variables were stacking faster than her envelope could resolve them.
Director. Sensor sweep on the colony returns nine targets in the open and an indeterminate number under cover. The cover signature is consistent with Goa'uld personal cloaking. I cannot give you a count.
"Triage."
Civilians clustered at the hydroponic core. Twelve confirmed alive. Six unconfirmed. SGC squad — three dead, two wounded, one unaccounted.
"Sam."
Walter patched her through. Her voice came up at the speakers — calm, fast, the Sam voice she used when she was reading three displays simultaneously and the only sentence she had time for was the next sentence.
"Drew. We're seventeen minutes out. I have your sweep on my display. The cover signature is two Goa'uld first-prime detachments with cloaking. Twelve to fifteen ground troops. They are between the civilians and us."
"Kawalsky."
Kawalsky's voice. "Ready to drop. I need three minutes after Sam's first pass to get the augmented teams down."
"Jack."
Jack. "Drew. SG-1 plus three teams at the gate. I can send four through right now if you want a second front."
"Hold the second front. The cloaking detachments will pivot to the gate the moment they see the gate open. Send through when Kawalsky has feet on the ground."
"Copy."
I sat down at the console. The fan whine at one point two kilohertz was loud in the quiet office. I had not heard the fan whine in three weeks. I heard it now.
The Comms Jam went up at 0623.
I authorized it after the fourth indeterminate sensor return on the cloaked detachments. AURORA-7 calculated the cost: eighteen tokens, seventeen minutes of full-envelope coverage across the colony's local subspace band, plus a detectable ELINT trace from the SGC subspace relay that any sufficiently advanced observer would log against Earth's signature for the next eleven months.
I authorized.
The jam went up. The cloaking detachments lost their command-channel coordination at 0624. By 0626 they were fighting in groups of three and four instead of as integrated units. By 0631 Kawalsky's first augmented team had killed two of them and pinned three more against the hydroponic core wall. By 0640 the civilian cluster of twelve was through the back of the core and into Kawalsky's evacuation corridor.
The Comms Jam revealed the proxy's command channel signature in the third minute. AURORA-7 captured it cleanly.
Director. Channel captured. This is a Mehet-architecture command signal at the local layer with a senior overlay I cannot match against my baseline. The senior overlay is consistent with Ba'al's command grammar. I have logged both.
"Capture the overlay first. Strip the local signal."
Done.
The jam came down at 0640. The seventeen-minute window had been long enough.
By 0700 Kawalsky had twenty-six civilians through the gate. By 0730 the count was thirty-one. By 0815 the final count was thirty-two — eleven dead, three SGC dead, one SGC wounded who would live, one SGC unaccounted at colony close.
The colony was a permanent loss. Kawalsky's last team off the world before the structures burned was Jack's, and Jack's last act on the ground was to detonate the hydroponic core so it would not become a Goa'uld supply asset. The wind on that world carried the smoke north.
The casualty wall draft updated at 0815 with fourteen new lines.
I came down the corridor from the gate room at 0844. I had not eaten. I had not changed clothes. The shirt I was wearing was the one I had pulled from Janet's chair four hours ago. I sat down at the small table in front of the wall draft where Walter had laid out fourteen blank typewritten name cards with the date and the world designation pre-printed and the line for the name left empty.
I picked up the pen.
The pen was the Raytheon. I had carried it in my breast pocket. I uncapped it.
I wrote the first name.
LT. ELIJAH WAKEFIELD — SGC
I wrote the second name. The pen ran dry halfway through the surname. I shook it. I tried it again. The nib gave half a millimeter of ink and stopped.
SGT. MARIA DELG—
I sat with the half-name in front of me. The Raytheon pen was thirty years old. The cartridge in it had been refilled three weeks ago. The dry was not the cartridge. The dry was the way the pen was sitting in my hand at 0846 in yesterday's shirt after four hours of strategic command at L4.
I did not finish the surname with another pen.
I capped the Raytheon. I set it on the table beside the half-finished card. I stood. I walked to my office. I opened the desk drawer where the spare cartridges lived. I changed the cartridge. I walked back to the table. I uncapped the Raytheon. I finished the second name. SGT. MARIA DELGADO — SGC. I wrote the third name. SPC. AARON LEE — SGC.
The remaining eleven names were the civilians. I did not yet have all eleven from the registrar — Walter was still cross-referencing the colony manifest against the survivor list, which would take until 0930. I wrote the four names I had — ALMA CHAUDHARY. BEN GIDEON. SHIRA OKONJO. MIRA OKONJO. — and I left the seven blank lines for the registrar to complete.
I capped the pen. I put it in the breast pocket. I stood up.
Walter was in the doorway.
"Sir."
"Yeah."
"Janet is on line three. She has not asked. She is on line three."
"Tell her I'll call back at oh-nine-hundred."
"Yes sir."
He paused.
"Sir."
"Walter."
"The ELINT trace."
"I know."
"Logged on the SGC relay record. I have flagged it for your private review. The Goa'uld will not see it for at least sixty days at their analysis cadence. Other parties may see it sooner."
"How much sooner."
"Ranges from days to thirty-six hours, depending on who is listening."
I looked at the wall. I looked at the four civilian names on the white cards. I looked at the seven blank lines.
"Get me Hammond at oh-nine-fifteen," I said.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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