"Sir, I have the data right here, and I think you need to take this in your office with the door closed."
Walter was in my doorway at 1347. He had a single sheet of printout in his left hand and the small handheld signal-scope in his right. The scope's display was still active and the trace on it was a sine wave at a frequency I had never seen on the SGC subspace band.
"Show me."
He came in. He closed the door behind him. He set the scope on the desk so the trace faced me. The trace was perfectly clean, modulated in the harmonic structure I had read in the Asgard tech profiles AURORA-7 had filed at ch 38 and had not surfaced since. The harmonic was the Asgard signature.
Director.
"I see it."
Ancestor-acknowledged. The substrate is Asgard hologram-tier transmission. I recommend Translation Real-Time before transmission opens. Cost five tokens.
"Authorize. Walter."
"Sir."
"Get me a clean transmission relay in this office and lock the door from the corridor side. Whoever is on the other end of this signal is going to want me to be alone."
"Done."
He moved. The clean relay went up in ninety seconds — Walter had pre-staged the equipment in the corner of my office on his own initiative two weeks ago, after the Tollan vote had closed the Tollana gate and made the day-after-tomorrow problem the day-after-tomorrow problem. The clean relay had been waiting. I had not known.
The Asgard signature pulsed on the scope. It resolved into a transmission request at 1351. I authorized the receive.
The hologram came up in the center of the office.
He was the size of a child and the color of pewter and his eyes were larger than I had been prepared for. The light he came in on was blue-white and it filled the office to the corners. AURORA-7's Translation Real-Time engaged at the edge of my hearing and his voice arrived in my own internal voice three quarters of a second after he spoke it.
"Drew Ramsey. We have observed."
The line landed in my chest before AURORA-7 had finished translating. Three words. The Asgard register. Selmak had said the same words at the Serrakin signing, at a register that had been Tok'ra and audit-firm. Thor's register was older. Thirty thousand years of patience and a long defeat I could hear underneath.
"Thor. You honor us by coming."
"We have observed your emergence. We have considered. We come because we have detected a signature on your perimeter that we have seen before. It is not Goa'uld. It is not Tok'ra. It is older than the war you are fighting."
AURORA-7 was silent at the back of my skull. I had time, in the half-second before I answered, to register that her silence was not the silence of low power. It was the silence of a system that had been asked to interpret a signal it had no model for.
"What is the signature."
"There is an enemy your foreknowledge cannot predict."
I held the hologram's eyes. I did not move. I did not let my left thumb go to my right forefinger.
I counted thirteen seconds.
"We will prepare," I said. "We thank you for the warning."
"You will need more than preparation. We will return when we have determined what we can share. For now, prepare your fleet. Prepare your AI."
The pewter face inclined.
The hologram cut.
The office was very quiet for a long count.
Drew.
"Yes."
I cannot interpret the signature on his transmission. The line "older than the war you are fighting" indexes against three patterns in my baseline and none of them at greater than twenty-two percent confidence.
"Log it."
Logged. He said "prepare your AI." That was directed at me.
"Yes."
I have no recommendation.
"I know."
I sat at the desk in the after-light of the hologram for a long count. Walter was outside the door. The scope on the desk had gone back to its idle trace. The pewter color stayed in my eyes for thirty seconds longer than the light had.
The Ba'al ceasefire offer arrived through Selmak's council channel at 1518.
Jacob brought it himself. He sat across from me at my desk with the same posture he had used the morning he had brought the three-name Serrakin folder, and he laid the offer down on top of the Asgard scope printout that was still on my desk because I had not put it away.
"He's offering ceasefire," Jacob said.
"Through whom."
"Through Mehet's proxy network. Routed up to a senior cousin's protocol office. Plausibly Ba'al-deniable. Operationally Ba'al."
"Reasons stated."
"Mehet wants to consolidate his proxy position. He is asking for ninety days of mutual non-engagement to reorganize his supply line after the depot strike. He is offering an exchange of prisoners and a freeze on outer-arc activity."
"Romero."
"Romero is on the list."
I read the offer. AURORA-7 ran the language structure through her false-trade pattern library and surfaced the result in the back of my skull at sixty-eight percent confidence.
Director. This is a stalling offer. The ninety-day window matches Ba'al's repositioning cone from the day-71 counter strike with a margin of seventeen days for an additional offensive preparation we cannot yet identify.
"Selmak."
Selmak surfaced. "We agree. The offer is false at the upper layer."
"And Romero?"
"Romero is alive. The offer's only honest line. He is being held as the counter-leverage that makes the false offer feel honest."
I sat with the offer for a count of ten.
I picked up the Raytheon pen with the fresh cartridge. I wrote my acceptance on the protocol-response line. On behalf of Earth, we accept the terms of the ninety-day mutual non-engagement. I signed it. A. Ramsey. Clean.
"Jacob."
"Yeah."
"Send the acceptance. Flag the private read as false-ceasefire."
"You're accepting it anyway."
"I'm accepting it anyway. I want Romero off the list and I want ninety days for the Asgard signature to clarify. If we have to break the ceasefire at day eighty-seven, we break it at day eighty-seven."
"Understood." Jacob stood. He folded the acceptance into his coat pocket. "Drew."
"Yeah."
"You're not telling Hammond about Thor yet."
"I'm telling Hammond at sixteen-hundred. I'm telling him both at once. Walter goes formal as the inter-race comm node tonight."
"You moved fast on Walter."
"I have to."
Jacob nodded. He left.
Hammond signed Walter's protocol at 1734 in his Texas-script cursive. Walter did not say thank you. Hammond did not expect him to.
I was at Janet's kitchen table at 2057 with the second coffee of the evening and the porch light cycling on through the front window. Cassandra was upstairs. The coffee on the counter was still warm because Janet had remade it ten minutes ago without telling me she was doing it.
Janet sat across from me. She had a half-glass of wine she had not touched. Her hand was flat on the table. The earring was in the lobe and her fingers were not on it.
"Drew."
"Yeah."
"Where does it come from."
I looked at her.
"The intel," she said. "The way you knew about the colony before they paged you. The way you knew about the Goa'uld woman last week before Jacob had a meeting. The way you knew about Aldwin's wedding ring six weeks before Aldwin told anyone he was married. Where."
I did not look away.
I counted ten seconds. I let the seconds pass. I let her see me let them pass.
"I can't tell you yet."
She did not move for two seconds.
"Okay," she said.
The okay was not Cassandra's okay. Cassandra's had been a small nod and a turning back to the dishes. Janet's was a sentence with a period and the period was the door closing on something Janet had been carrying for a long time and had now decided to set down inside the room with us.
She picked up the wineglass. She drank from it for the first time tonight.
"Drew."
"Yeah."
"When you can tell me, you will tell me."
"Yes."
"Before anyone else."
"Yes."
"Including Cassandra."
"Including Cassandra."
She nodded. Once. She put the wineglass down.
She did not ask another question.
We sat at the table for twenty more minutes. We talked about a movie that was coming out in two weeks that Janet had read a review of. She asked me whether I had heard from Hammond about the Tollan gate closure formally, and I said yes, and she said that one really hurt, didn't it, and I said yes, and she said Sam Carter took it harder than she's letting on, and I agreed.
The SRD pager on the counter stayed dark.
At 2117 I stood up to go to the apartment, because Janet had a six-a.m. start and I had a Hammond eight-a.m., and Janet did not ask me to stay tonight and I did not offer.
She walked me to the door.
She put her palm against my cheek the way she had at the SRD office on the night of the L4 unlock, and her thumb sat on the right temple where the contraction had been and was no longer.
"I love you, Drew."
"I love you, Janet."
She closed the door behind me.
I stood on the porch for a count of five. The porch light was on. Inside, through the front window, Janet picked up the wineglass from the table and walked it to the kitchen and set it in the sink without rinsing it.
I walked to the car.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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