Janet Frasier has taken two oaths in her life: one as a doctor, and one as an officer in the United States Air Force.
Those oaths are clashing for the first time.
Janet knows that she isn't infallible. Despite all her efforts, one day, someone will die in her infirmary. She's been lucky so far - well, a combination of luck, hard work, a marvelously efficient staff, and some desperate improvisation. People die in the course of this terrifying war, but she's winning the battlefield in her own domain. Every life she saves is another victory, even if some lose the struggle before she has the chance to fight on their behalf.
It happens, Janet knows. She leaves the arrogance of belief in one's own omnipotence for the Goa'uld, although some surgeons she's worked with could give them a run for their money. Janet hates knowing it, but she's all too aware of the inevitable.
There will come a time when she won't be able to restart a heart, when offworld germs prove impervious to onworld medications, when the injuries are too severe or the blood loss too great. A moment will come when she feels a pulse falter and fail, when resuscitation meets unresponsive lungs, when adrenaline or defibrillation or a dozen little tricks and cheats just don't work any more. And when it happens, she will bow her head in defeat, mark the time for the official record, and mentally add one more tally to the grudge she has against death.
But she doesn't want it to happen like that today.
It seems unfair - but when is life fair, after all? - that she needs to fight against alien diseases, wounds caused by alien weapons, when she only has Terran methods at her disposal. The temptation of using Goa'uld technology to help defeat Goa'uld depredations is a seductive, sibilant whisper in her ear: It would be worth it. Think of all the lives we can save. She forces herself to remember how Daniel Jackson's body almost shut down, how he'd been strapped down and sedated and still found the insane strength to grip her arm with steely fingers and hurl her bodily across the room.
No, she has to use the arsenal that human ingenuity and human dedication has distilled and invented, the medications and machines that she knows and trusts. But they aren't working this time, because even though she's broken enough of the viral chain to determine how to fight it, tetracycline isn't enough. Janet has a young lieutenant tossing restlessly in her infirmary, fever soaring, who desperately needs an alternative.
And she can't get it for him.
Wildfire. Base locked down. Nothing goes out… and nothing comes in.
Graham Simmons is allergic to tetracycline.
...to practice and prescribe to the best of my ability for the good of my patients...
She needs that alternative.
"Don't make me repeat myself, Doctor."
She wants to take the general by the shoulders and scream at him, "Forget the stupid miltary rules! You're killing my patient!"
But she's taken that other oath, too.
...I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic...
Foreign, ha. Can't get much more foreign than an alien orb from a dead world pinning Colonel O'Neill to the wall. O'Neill is slowly dying. The entire base might not be far behind.
Maybe all of Earth.
Like the other officers in Stargate Command, she isn't just defending her country. She's fighting on the front lines to save the whole world.
Lockdown. Wildfire.
Stop the organism from spreading deadly tendrils to the rest of the planet. Let a young man die.
Janet Frasier has taken two oaths in her life.
The two of them have never truly clashed.
Until now.
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Alphabet Soup
by Fig NewtonKapitel Bemerkung:
For Janet Alphabet Soup. Against the backdrop of Message in a Bottle, Janet struggles with the conflict of the two oaths in her life.Site Navigation
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