Space...It's right through here!

Posted on Thu Feb 28th, 2019 @ 10:03pm by Brigadier General Nathan Wolf & Civillian Ravi Azad PhD

Mission: A Brand New Day
Location: Cheyenne Mountain: Project New Dawn
Timeline: Current

"General?" Senior Master Sergeant Brenda Sinclair said as she stuck her head into Wolf's office. "Doctor Azad has been passed through Security. The SFs have politely separated him from his belongings and they're going through everything now. Anything they don't confiscate should be given back to him when he leaves."

"Thank you, Sergeant," Nathan said. "When he gets down here, send him in. I have his file, right? Somewhere?"

"Left side of your desk, no, yes, that one," Sinclair said guiding Nathan to the file. "I'll send him in as soon as he arrives."

Nathan took some time to familiarize himself with Azad's background. Childhood, family, education, training, career. He had the chops. But could he handle being a part of something this big?

That remained to be seen. Ravi, for his part, was still utterly confused about what he'd gotten himself into. They had confiscated his phone when he arrived and promised to return it so he could keep in touch with his family, but he didn't have a lot of hope on that front. As long as they gave him their phone numbers, he could call them whenever and from any phone, so he didn't suppose that was really such a big deal. Even so, the security around this place was unbelievable. They'd checked him for weapons a total of five times! Five!

And now, he was being led down a windowless hallway to gods knew where. Finally, a door was opened for him and he was gestured inside. Hesitantly, he entered the room.

Nathan looked up, saw Ravi, and rose from his chair. "Please come in, Doctor," he said, offering his hand. "Brigadier General Nathan Wolf. The United States Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, has put me in charge of this insane asylum we like to call Project New Dawn. Please, sit, Doctor. We've got quite a bit to talk about."

Ravi shook the General's hand. "Thank you, sir, it is a pleasure to meet you," he said in his lightly accented voice as he took a seat across from the other man.

"So," Nathan said. "I know you've signed the official secrets act form, but I want to be crystal clear with you. You're being read into what is possibly the biggest and most important secret project the United States military and other branches of our government is involved in. If this secret were to get out, the entire balance of world power would shift. There are many foreign governments who would object to this, and use military force against us to express their feelings of inadequacy. All manner of zealots, not to mention full blown crackpots, will crop up. There will be civil unrest, and the recent increase in nationalism around the globe will pale in comparison with what we'll see if this secret were to leak out. I know you don't know what the secret is, but are you understanding the consequences of talking out of school?"

“Absolutely, sir,” replied Ravi, ever respectful. “And now you have not only my signature, but also my word. I will not tell a soul.”

"Good," Nathan said. He picked up his phone. "Yes, hello Nurse Ratchet. Yes. Yes I fine and how are you? Really? How wonderful. I was wondering, could you be a dear and bring the antidote to that slow acting poison we put in Doctor Azad's dinner last night? Yes, he's agreed to keep our secrets. Oh, and you might want to hurry. I don't think he has much time left. Thanks."

Nathan hung up the phone and looked at Ravi as though everything was normal...then burst out laughing! "Sorry, Doctor, I couldn't resist. No, you weren't poisoned. Now, let me ask you, do you believe in life on other planets?"

Ravi- who had sat up straight in alarm at his request for an antidote- visibly relaxed and even gave a weak grin. "Well, I think they are probably out there," he answered. "Although, I suppose I would have to say I would not be surprised either way."

"Good, Doctor," Nathan said. "Because there are two alien members of Project New Dawn at the moment. There may be more joining in the future and I'd like to see a time where it's not unusual to have a few visiting on any given day. I might even have occasion to send you to another world yourself, Doctor. So, do you think you could handle that? Meeting and working with aliens? Maybe traveling to other worlds? Working with, repairing, and sometimes reverse engineering alien technology?"

Nathan was speaking in a matter of fact tone, as though interviewing someone for a perfectly normal job in which all of these things he was talking about might actually happen in the course of a normal day.

Head swimming with all the information, Ravi blinked rapidly. "Aliens?" he finally managed to say. "Real, honest to goodness aliens? And- and other worlds? You mean you've actually found some? Some real other worlds? You are not just going to plop me in the middle of Egypt and tell me it's a different world in order to gauge my reaction of something?"

Nathan chuckled. "Real aliens, Doctor. However, you'd be surprised how many humans there are living out there, humans from ancient cultures...oh I could go into the whole thing, but there's a briefing packet you can read and once you've read it you can ask any questions you have and if you're cleared for the answers, you'll get them. The long and the short of it is that over 100 years ago, a group of archaeologists found a device of ancient design we know as a stargate. When you dial the address of another gate, on another world, or, as we understand things, even aboard a ship in space if it's in a fixed spot and you know where that spot is, anyway, a stable wormhole is created between the two gates and people and objects can travel through them. There's much, much more than that. And if you say you'll work here, Doctor, you can not only read about it, you can take part in the adventure. Are you in?"

Though still slightly skeptical, Ravi's curiosity got the better of him. "I am most certainly in!" he replied excitedly. "When do I get to meet them?"

Nathan chuckled. "I like your eagerness, Doctor. Unfortunately, they're both off-world at the moment, but I expect them back later today if their mission goes well, or at least doesn't go too badly. But you'll find specs for our stargate, all of the information we've put together about it. How it works, how to interface with it, etc. You'll also find details of our homemade 'dial home device'. On other worlds, these gates have their own DHDs. We couldn't find the one for our gate. The gate was found in the early 1900s, but it took until the 1990s before we had technology we could use to interface with the gate and make it dial. As you'll read in the reports, there was an attempted invasion of Earth by a member of an alien race known as the Goa'uld. I'll explain more in a moment, but what you need to know is that while the old Stargate Command was busy repelling the attack, there was a cave-in here that buried these lower levels of the complex and the stargate. We had to dig it all out, salvage what we could, and build the dialing computer from scratch. Luckily we salvaged all of the information they had on extrapolating functional gate addresses from the out of date ones they found on a planet known as Abydos. There's an algorithm that compensates for stellar drift. Anyway, our software and hardware is a lot more sophisticated than what they had access to two decades ago."

Nathan leaned back in his chair. "As for the Goa'uld...they're a parasitic race. They take hosts from other species and basically walk around in their bodies. Millennia ago, one of them discovered Earth. He found humans interesting, attractive, and useful. He took on the personage of Ra, the Egyptian God of the Sun and took a human host. He was the most powerful of these Goa'uld, and he convinced the others to take on human hosts and set themselves up as members of various pantheons. They ruled as gods here for a very long time. There was a rebellion in Egypt eventually. Goa'uld were driven away and the Earth gate was buried. But the Goa'uld had taken humans from various primitive Earth cultures and seeded them throughout the solar systems they controlled, and they've been cherry picking slaves and soldiers from those people ever since."

Ravi had no idea what most of that meant, but as it didn’t concern him at the moment, he didn’t much care. “I shall study hard and have it memorized by day after tomorrow,” he promised. “It would help if I could see the gate. I will not touch it, you have my word,” he added, holding up both hands in a sort of surrender position. “But just for a point of reference, I like to be able to see the equipment with which I will be working.”

"Fair enough," Nathan said. He looked at his watch. "Actually, you'll want to see this. Come with me this way to the control room."

Nathan rose and led the engineer from his office to the control room. Along the way, Nathan exchanged salutes with various military personnel, most US Air Force, but there were also Marines, and US Army personnel. Finally, they arrived in what would have looked even to a complete novice as something that could be called a 'control room'. The original SGC control room staff wouldn't have recognized this control room. It was larger and had much better equipment in it. Several USAF airmen and sergeants and officers started to rise and/or salute Nathan who waved them all down.

"As you were," Nathan said. "Major Clarkson, this is Doctor Ravi Azad. He'll be heading up the Engineering division from here on out. He wanted a look at the gate. I thought it would be nice for him to see it in action. If I recall, we're supposed to send a probe through in a few minutes. Am I right?"

"Yessir," the Major replied. "Come right over here where you can see, Doctor." Clarkson led Ravi over to the observation window. "We're going to open a gate to a planet we...frankly don't know anything about. Luckily, the gates are one way for physical objects. Energy, like radio waves, can go both ways so we can communicate with a team in the field no matter who opens the gate. But when we open and outgoing wormhole, nothing can come back through at us. We have some SFs on standby, but that's more for when teams are coming back through. So, anyway, we're going to send a probe through. Here goes..."

The control room staff began the dialing process, calling out when each chevron locked into place. When the seventh chevron locked into place, the wormhole opened with its usual spectacular effect.

"Pretty cool, right, Doc?" Clarkson said, grinning like a kid in a candy store. "There's another planet on the other side of that event horizon!"

All Ravi could do was to stare in wonder at the gate. It was fascinating. Glowing, swirling, pulsating- his brain couldn't quite wrap itself around what he was seeing. "Yesterday, I knew we had no way of getting to another world," he breathed, gazing wide-eyed at the gate. "Imagine what I'll know tomorrow."

Clarkson chuckled. "Watch this!" she turned to one of the airman manning a console. "Send through the probe. Put the image on the big screen once it starts sending images and data."

The Airman acknowledged the command and using the controls on his console, guided a small, six-wheeled, unmanned vehicle loaded with sensor equipment through the wormhole. A moment or two later, the big screen filled with images from another world. The surrounding seemed a little bit tundra-like, a bit sparse, but beautiful in their own way.

"There you go, Doctor," Clarkson said. "Live video from another planet. What do think? Do we have really cool jobs, or what?"

It could have been Siberia for all Ravi knew, but something was... off. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, though. There was something different about the whole scene that he just couldn't quite place. And suddenly, as if someone had slipped a switch, he saw it. "It's pink!" he breathed. It wasn't dark, but like someone had put a single drop of red in a bucket of white paint. Just a tint. And the blue was just slightly lavender. It was almost unnoticeable, but it made everything look slightly other-worldly. He had a sudden urge to jump through the gate and was infinitely grateful that he wasn't quite sure how to get into the control room; he didn't need to get stranded on an alien planet on his first day.

"Almost makes you want to go through, doesn't it, Doctor?" Nathan said. "Maybe someday. I'm expecting at some point I'll be going through to help negotiate with some of those humans living out there that I mentioned. Maybe we'll take you through one day and put your engineering skills to good use. Until then, you can put them to good use here. That gate out there, all of this tech that allows us to run it, that's yours now. And, while your at it, you'll have the opportunity to examine plenty of technology that we're hoping to acquire in our travels, and to figure out how we can make use of it, not just against the System Lords, but to better humanity. Clarkson has it right, Doctor. This is possibly the best job on the planet. I'll leave you to get acquainted with how all of this works. Again, welcome, Doctor."

Nathan nodded to Clarkson and left the control room.

But, Ravi was far too mesmerized by everything he was seeing to reply. He couldn't wait to get his hands on that gate and see how it worked.