22
He hated waking up in his clothes, after all the years of spending days on end without changing, while captured or on a hostile world, he felt that he should always undress for sleep. He leaned over and slapped the annoying alarm clock that was buzzing its message. OK… OK he knew it was 0500, he had woken, as usual, 30 seconds before the machine had started squawking.
He struggled out of the duvet that was wrapped around him, and noticed Sam wasn't there. He used the bathroom and changed into his jeans and a shirt.
The rattle of dishes told him where he could find her and he moved silently down the corridor. He had intended to sneak up behind her but at the last minute thought better than to frighten a pregnant woman and he made sure she heard him moving.
"Sorry about yesterday" she said, not turning to face him. He could imagine that she was embarrassed, not that he thought she had anything to be sorry about but he knew her well, and sure enough her next words confirmed it. "I think I feel well enough to go into day, yesterday was just a one off" he wrapped his arms around her.
"I was thinking you would like to come to the gulf, as you have a day off. Help me with the testing" her eyes lit up… she had wanted to work more on the puddle jumpers, but had never managed to secure permission. The PTB had never wanted to risk breaking their only working model, but it shouldn't stop her looking over the newer craft as long as she was in it.
He called Teal'c to tell him he would not be taking Jane, as he had planned to, and they left to go up the mountain at 0530. It was like 'gate travel, he would be setting out with his jumper at 0700, and arriving in the gulf at 17:55, after travelling less than an hour.
They got their dessert camos on and had the security detail kitted out as well and were setting off well before time. Jack took her out of the atmosphere so the men could see Earth from orbit, while he relaxed into the seat and enjoyed the fact that his wife was next to him, and she was enjoying herself.
Sam couldn't control all the systems Jane had, but she could manage the manual ones, screen after screen appeared, strange lights blinked and a couple of times he cancelled orders that she inadvertently commanded, the manual release for the back doors was something he decided to put a warning label on when they returned, it wasn't a good idea to allow Jane to pilot when someone else was shotgun if they could open the doors into vacuum. She may not have recognised the warning the machine sent to its pilot when the circuit was tripped.
Less than an hour later they put down in an abandoned fishing village on the coast of the Persian gulf. Security was tight around what looked like a school and Jack parked his stealthed jumper in a roofless building close by. He radioed for a patrol to guard the building as he and his people disembarked. Sam stayed in the jumper happily testing systems and pushing buttons.
The heat thumped down on them as they walked out, Jack was glad he had on his usual clothes for missions, and pulled his battered baseball cap from his pocket and put it on. He would have collapsed if he had been in full Class As. Much as he hated the cold, the heat in this part of the world brought back some bad memories, and he would be happy to leave.
The patrol turned up as they left the sheltering building, he ordered them to guard the outside but under no circumstances were they to enter, they may wonder what the hell they were doing if they did and saw it 'empty'.
He moved to the school. Instead of the expected 17 he had 20 people waiting for him, he did a roll call of the names he had cut orders for and pulled the three others to the back room of the school. All three stood to rigid attention, and it was only then that he realised he had 3 Brits on his hands.
"Orders from the Secretary of the Defence, Sir" the ranking officer said, coming even more to attention. He handed over a package and Jack noted the IOA marking on the papers he pulled out. It seemed that these three people had already been screened as having the AG and were close enough to be diverted to the meeting. Jack looked through the package, he had orders for each, the same as he had for his own countrymen. He would rather have Brits than Russians any day, he had worked several times with British soldiers in his black ops days and he liked their sense of humour, it was always dark and nasty, like his.
"OK Colonel, you may go back and join the others, I'll be in soon" the dismissed men turned on their heels and smartly marched out of the room, Jack grabbed up his radio but when he asked to be patched through to the IOA all he got was puzzled operators.
He was getting very short tempered when he finally got through to DC and Woolsey and Chapman. He asked how long it would take to fully scan the database and was told probably a couple of weeks, the British had one of the largest standing armies in the world, and it would take almost as long to scan theirs as it had to do the US. Added to which they had no data on their academy people, only serving officers and reserves… and what they called the TA, sort of like the National Guard.
Jack lowered his head and banged it a couple of times on the desk, he could see he would be running around for quite some time to come. He had hoped that after this week things would get into some sort of routine, and all of it being at Cheyenne Mountain.
He growled a farewell to the men in DC and rose to his feet. Time to get today's over with, and get these people back to their posts, after all though it was early morning to him most of these were at the end of an already long day.
He gave the usual speech and tested each person. All 3 Brits were level 3, he had 2 level 3s from the navy, 1 from the AF, and 2 from the army. He had also 1 level 2 AF officer, all the rest were 2s and 1s he dismissed them and told the ones left their new orders. He arranged to pick them up at the same place on Sunday evening… their time… and transport them back to Cheyenne Mountain himself.
They got back to the mountain in plenty of time for lunch, Jack went to his office leaving Sam to visit with Daniel, a plan that had to change when it turned out that Vala had returned from trying to unsuccessfully secure a sarcophagus for Sam, and the pair of them were holed up in her quarters. Through the afternoon Jack got reports of Sam wandering the halls of the SGC like some sort of haunting spirit or a junkie looking for a fix, she hadn't tried to access her lab but she had bugged Walter several times. Jack was trying his best not to interfere with Hanks running of the place, after all that was one of the reasons why people involved with each other weren't allowed in the same chain of command.
He knew his wife, he knew just how much she was wanting to be busy and feel useful, but he in no way wanted to undermine the man he had chosen to run the place. He felt trapped. Before his promotions he wouldn't have given it a second thought, his team had always come first unless the whole planet was at stake, but now Hank was under his command, in other words a part of the team. The bond was nothing at all like the one he had with Daniel and Teal'c not even like the bond he had with Reynolds or Dixon or Ferretti, but still, he felt he had to do everything in his power to protect the man and the authority he had to wield.
He eventually gave in and signed out of the mountain at 1500, taking Sam home, she was full of nervous energy the whole way down the road, she had never been lazy in her life and she was finding it almost more than she could bear.
After they got home he sat down in the small office in the house, he had 38 AGs of various talents and experience, and he was going to have to find some way of sorting them, should he go by rank? Strength of the gene? Age? Time in combat? He scrubbed his face with his hands, this wasn't his usual forte.
He decided to look at it differently and plan as if he were going into combat with them. The 4s were going to be useful in lots of places, however most of them were young and lacking in any experience, and the situations they would be placed in were going to be very dangerous, but Atlantis needed people NOW that could activate the technology.
Jack decided to take anyone with more than 6 months combat experience and get them through the training programme as quickly as possible, no matter what level the AG strength, after Atlantis had enough gene holders to safely run teams offworld he could concentrate on the younger people.
At the moment, due to a recent meeting with the Wraith, there were only 4 AGs on Atlantis not counting Jon or Sheppard, who were able to fly a jumper without a problem. A far cry from the 15 they had managed to get into craft when they had needed to clear a way through an asteroid belt. Even with the Gene therapy there was a very high failure rate, less than 1 in 25 of people given the injection had developed a useful level 2. And 1 in 20 had had a bad reaction. The laws governing drugs and medical testing in the US meant that once they had the numbers only people over in Pegasus had been allowed to continue to try.
They were still fighting a war over there and could only really send out 2 teams at a time, leaving enough people to go to the rescue of them if there was a problem, and one of the natural AGs was a medic who refused to fight under any circumstances, though she didn't mind being a 'taxi driver'.
It was such a totally different situation from the one in the Milky Way, the Goa'uld made people live near the 'gates, so SG teams could usually walk where they needed to go. Because of the Wraith, in Pegasus they scattered as far away as they could. Jumpers were the ONLY proper way to explore.
With down time to just recover from missions, not counting if someone was hurt, it meant they could only be moving two or three missions a month. Not enough for proper intel to protect the outpost.
Of the people from the gulf, 7 of the 9 had more than the minimum experience he had decided was necessary. He sent an email to Teal'c stating the new order he was setting, and the names of the people he wanted to be trained up first.
A crash resounded through the house, he felt his chair move as the floorboards rattled. Jack jumped up and ran into the kitchen… nothing, nor was there any sign in the living room or the bedroom. That left just two places, he went into the guest bedroom, the place they had decided to convert to a nursery.
Sam was laid on the floor, the curtain pole across her lower body, she had evidently been putting up the new curtains she had bought and had slipped. His body went on automatic as he checked her for injury, and called Carolyn Lam at the SGC, within minutes a siren sounded and an ambulance pulled up outside, the security force surrounded it and Jack saw red as he had to leave her side to give permission for the men to enter. There was no sign of her recovering consciousness as they loaded her in the ambulance. He jumped in after her and they broke all speed limits getting up the mountain.
The problem with her physiology meant she couldn't be admitted to the closer hospital and Jack worried that the extra distance would one day mean the difference between life and death, he decided that they would start looking for a closer home to the mountain as soon as she came out of the infirmary.
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