Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 belongs to Glanser/Wright Productions and Gekko Film Corp, it is not mine. Dark Angel is the creation of James Cameron. Note: the story picks up shortly after where “For Your Eyes Only” left off. Written for crossovers100 prompt #66 rain.
“Petals in a Windstorm” by Karen
No sooner than he had made his appearance at the Jam Pony beer counter delivered his whispered warning, than Zack was gone. Not that Max was entirely surprised by this, the guy could stand in for the picture next to the dictionary entry on 'paranoid. She didn't blame him for that, after their shared and individual experiences with the Manticore project and their subsequent escape, they all dealt with it in different ways.
Max got up from her bar-stool and thumped her empty glass of whiskey on the counter, turning around and figuring that it was time she got back to Logan's place. Outside, through the gritty and rain-streaked windows she could see that the night sky was slowly making the transition from night into day, a few stars glimpsed through the dirty white rain clouds.
Max strolled over to the wall near the entrance where she'd hung her leather jacket, snagged it off the hook and put it on, then opened the door and went back outside. The rain had lessened while she'd be sitting and talking with Zack, but it seemed to never truly let up in Seattle.
She didn't exactly mind the rain, it gave the sharper defined edges of things a softer muted appearance, it also gave the air a clearer smell, while she stood thinking about this, she glanced down onto the concrete sliver of the dirt-packed road beneath her feet, noticing that the raindrops that plonked down on the roofs and streets and made concentric rainbow -colored rings on the ground.
Max shook her head and straddled her bike, starting the engine, then she pulled out of the side street and back on the main thoroughfare.
Meanwhile Logan Cale, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, waited in his kitchenette of his apartment sipping a cup of tea and reading through the late edition of the Seattle Daily Times. Beside his left shoulder was a rather worn and thumbed-through copy of a Sudoku book, a much-reduced pencil resting on top of it.
When Max arrived at Logan’s apartment, he had a big smile plastered on his face, he was always happy to see her, despite the many obstacles that seemed to be thrown up in the way of their relationship. Max, for the moment, let down her guard and shoved Zack’s warning to a back corner of her mind.
“Hello, Max,” Logan said. “You’re looking well, come on, inside out of the rain, I’ve got some hot coffee brewing, if you’d like some.”
“Sure,” replied Max, laying down the parking break of her bike as she got off and leaned it up against the doorframe, then went inside, while Logan held the door open for her. That was one of the main things that she appreciated and liked about Logan. He was always the ideal gentlemen, and no matter how weird of dangerous things got for them, he hardly ever lost that intent, determined and studied equanimity. It made for a nice mix,” she thought.
“It’s not fair,” Max suddenly burst out. “I mean, It’s not fair that it feels that we have to live the way we do, sulking about and only seeing each other on the rare occasions when you’ve got a job for me, or when I’ve got some down time.”
“What do you want me to say to that?” sighed Logan, running his hands through the thick strands of her dark hair, as the sat on the over-stuffed leather couch in his living room.
Interlude
Colorado, present day
General Hammond of the SG command sat at the briefing table at the Cheyenne Mountain Base with the members of SG-1, his arms folded on top of the table and that same studied calm on his face.
“Thank you all for coming, and while Senator Kinsey is here on an inspection tour, we’ll have to make the best of things, I’m sure you all understand what I mean by that?”
“I hate politicians,” Jack O’Neill muttered under his breath, while he looked around and shared a significant exchange of glances with his fellow members of his squad. Returning his attention to General Hammond. “We understand, Sir. We don’t have to like it, but I guess for the duration of his stay, we’ll tolerate him as best we can.”
“Just to be certain, I want you all to do more than ‘tolerate’ him, if Kinsey has his way, he does have the ear of the President, and a lot of pull in Washington, and let’s face, without funding we just me get shut down.” Hammond sighed. “After everything that we’ve been through, I would hate for it all to end because of the inevitable ‘budget cuts.” That would be a terrible way to go out.”
“Indeed, General Hammond,” Teal’C earnestly said while attempting to suppress a mischievous grin.
“The word is that our pal. Mr. Kinsey has been allocating funds for several unannounced side trips to the West Coast, specifically Seattle, Washington. And ordinarily we would leave such matters to the appropriate authorities, except for one niggling little detail, he’s got the NID backing his little project. It’s supposed to be very hush-hush.”
“What’s that got to do with us?” asked Major Carter as she drummed the surface of the table with one fingernail.
“According to my latest intelligence it seems Kinsey has for the moment, given up thoughts of trying to shut us down by cutting off our funding, instead he’s been trying to go about trying to replace us.”
”I’d like to see him try,” Colonel O’Neill flashed a malicious and wry grin of his own.
“Indeed, Colonel O’Neill,” replied, “There’s just one problem with that scenario, Kinsey has been making waves in the wrong circles, and there’s one phrase that keeps coming up…”
“And what is that one word?” Doctor Jackson asked.
“Manticore.”
“Doesn’t mean a thing to me but if you hum a few bars maybe I’ll pick up the tune,” replied Major Carter.
“Me either, that’s way I’m sending you to Seattle on a commercial flight leaving Colorado in six hours, your cover is tourists. I want you to find out whatever you can about Manticore and its operations and why Kinsey is so hot and bothered about. Just kept it on the down-low if you get my meaning. Any questions?” None. Good.” Hammond and then declared the briefing concluded.
***
At the warehouse district, down by Seattle’s docks, the woman known as Original Cindy tried to talk her way out of a difficult situation. To her way of thinking, she could easily take these goons, but did she really want to risk it, and from her experience, ‘bastards always have brothers, I think I remember hearing that line from some old western movie marathon,” she muttered under her breath, ‘but then I’ve got a lot going for me, too. If these guys force the issue, we’ll they’ll get more than expect and that’s no mistake.”
She took up a fighting stance, her fists up and a determined look on her dark skinned face.
It had been raining steadily off in the city of Seattle for the better part of three weeks, so when she felt the first pinpricks of rain splattering on the top of her head, Cindy didn’t even look up. She liked the rain, it was soothing and cool.
The group of armed men, wearing flak and leather jackets, and armed with what appeared to be semi-automatic rifles, of a type that she had never seen before, closed ranks and moved in on her position.
In a back corner of her mind, the black woman known as Original Cindy, thought, :”This is damn incontinent, and I was having such a nice day, too, I just hope Max got my call, or this might turn out a whole lot different. Now that I stop to think about it, something about this whole setup isn’t right, this isn’t Manticore’s
style. What gives?’
For their part the armed men seemed willing to wait her out and then when the moment came, take advantage of an opening in her defenses before they captured and subdued her. Cindy didn’t like the situation one bit, but she was not being given much choice in the matter.
One man’s cell phone rang and he stepped aside in order to answer it.
Cindy’s hearing was more acute than most peoples so was able to split her attention while still keeping her eyes trained on her opponents. She caught one side of the conversation, but enough to understand that she had been ‘made.
Somebody or something had sold her out, but who. It wasn’t as if she didn’t trust all of her extended X-5 family, she would have trusted any and all of them with her life, but at any time any of them could have been compromised, White and Manticore, had a lot of pull, in a lot of different circles; anything could have tripped her up. While she listened to the man’s conversation, she caught one word, more an acronym than an actual word, NID, Chyenne, and Senator Kinsey, and the words ‘you’ve got yourself a deal.’
**
At Logan’s apartment, Max’s cell phone vibrated from where it rested in her hip pocket of her jeans.
“I’m sorry,” Max said, “I’ve got to take this.” She got up from the couch and took out her phone, flipping it open and pressing the green answer button. “Talk to me.”
“Max, it’s Cindy, I’ve run into a spot of trouble and I could really use your help down by the docks. It’s urgent that when you get this message, you meet at Pier #17. Thanks a ton.”
That was the end of the recorded message, Max turned off the phone and turned around to look at Logan. “Cindy’s in trouble, I have to go.”
Logan did not reply at first then he nodded. “I understand, do you want me to come along. I could drive you in my car.”
“No, thank you, but no, you understand when one of my ‘family is in trouble, I have to do this alone, right?”
“I understand, Max, “ Logan sighed, “I don’t have to like it, but I do understand why you have to do it. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Max replied as she strode forward and kissed him on the lips.
****
Later at the docks Max arrived at the designated pier expecting that Cindy would be there waiting for her.
Instead she found only an empty wind-swept dock and rain coming down in almost vertical sheets, plastering her leather coat to her body and her to her head. She had learned long ago never to trust that deceptive lull, the proverbial calm before the storm. Max left her bike and began prowling up and down the stretch of the harbor looking for signs of a struggle or other indications of where her friend and fellow X5 sister might have gone, or worse, been taken.
Max, in the back of her mind while she searched and kept a wary eye out for trouble, realized that White and the other Manticore goons likely would not have given them up that easily. After all the trouble they had individually and collectively caused for White and his agenda, it was only a matter of time before he resurfaced.
Max finally picked up the trail, following the lines of tire tracks and a piece of Cindy’s leather boots left lying on the pavement of the street.
The unmarked van with the blacked out tinted windows pulled up, three man got out and bent down to wrestle a large heavy bag into the open rear doors of the vehicle. Inside the bag, Cindy, heavily sedate and only partially conscious struggled against her bounds, the drug coursing through her system, and the anger at the situation. The men finally got her into the back of the van, walked around to the passenger side doors and climbed inside the van.
Max arrived at that very instant, circling around and planting herself squarely in front of the building, she had grabbed a loose metal pipe and held it in her hand like a quarter staff. “Going somewhere, boys?” she asked in a casually deceptive tone of voice. “I think you might have something in there that doesn’t belong to you. And I would very much appreciate if you gave it back to me.”
“I think you should turn around and leave, little girl,” the foremost man replied, thumbing the charging button on his wicked looking weapon. It had a snake’s head, and it was of type that neither Max nor Cindy had ever seen before. “This doesn’t concern you, and we have our orders.”
“Well, then, since you put it so nicely, I think I will stay around a little longer,” Max replied, moving a few steps closer. “That’s a friend of mine you’ve got tied up in there, and that makes it my business.”
“Max!” Cindy yelled, groggily coming out of her sedated state. Inside the back of the van Cindy continued to struggle and finally loosened her bounds enough to wriggled free of the sack. She sat up and promptly bumped her head on the crates, boxes stacked haphazardly inside.
“Damn it!” she cursed and sat bolt upright, this time with a little more care. She sidled forward to the front of the van, leaned over, and reached for the nearest man, grabbed a handful of his flannel shirt and yanked her up and over.
With that task accomplished, Cindy jumped into the front passenger seat and socked the driver, then she looked around for more targets, her adrenaline pumping. In the back of her mind she wondered where Max might be, she had heard Max earlier, taunting her captors into coming at her and making that one slip that would allow her the upper hand.
Sounds of a skirmish and weapons fire from farther away and behind momentarily distracted Max, but she wouldn‘t allow it do so for long. She had been trained and been at this too long to allow that to happen. Out of the corner of her peripheral vision she saw Original Cindy clamber out of the front of the van where she had apparently been bound and gagged.
Max allowed a small sigh of relief to see that her friend and X- 5 sister was not alive but still in one piece. She smiled and Cindy returned it, and with a brief nod separated to cover more ground; now these goons, no matter how many and how heavily armed would double trouble. Just as that thought crossed her mind Max saw more people entering the steadily crowded warehouse. “It’s getting that I can’t hear myself think in here, just how many people did these idiots invite to this party? We really should do something about crossing them off the list.’
The rain continued unabated throughout plastering her long hair to her face and scalp and the leather jack to her body like a second skin. She didn’t mind the rain, it was simply was another force of nature, just as she was a force of nature. Whatever else one wished to say about Manticore; they knew what they were doing when the had created the X-5’s.
As Max thought over what her next move should be she was momentarily distracted by the sounds of a scuffle breaking out and raised voices. Her opponents and those surrounding her friend split off and went over to the corner of the warehouse where the noises were the loudest. With an exchange of glances both women followed at a discreet distance.
It was at that instant that Max discovered that a new group, armed with snake-headed guns were taking care of her opponents quite nicely, and at the moment she had just begun to protest this intrusion on what she considered her turf a stray blasts from the snake-headed weapons hit her in the stomach and she toppled over onto her back. Cindy had been hit as well, and her last thought right up until the moment that the blackness of unconsciousness descended was: “It is getting entirely too crowded in here, so what the hell do I do about it? And what do they want with us, anyway?’
****
Colonel Jack O’Neil escorted the two women through the corridors of the base to the Medical Lab. The fact that the they were one up on the NID pleased him with the way things had turned out; it was not every day that the military arm got the upper hand on the civilian one. Colonel Harry Maybourne had not yet made an appearance nor made his displeasure known, and for that Jack was very content to let sleeping dogs lie.
At the Cheyenne Mountain base, in the medical bay,
Neither of the two female patients recently brought in by an escort of base security personnel and the members of SG-1 were conscious at the time of their arrival, but that was something that Doctor Janet Fraiser usually took in stride. However, both women evidenced signs of having been in a fire fight, and had multiple contusions and third-degree burns on their upper arms and hands.
Dr. Fraiser treated them for and saved her own opinions and theories about the readings that showed up on her computer monitors for the debriefing scheduled at 0800 hours the following morning. If her readings were correct and her mind was not playing tricks her, these two, when they regained consciousness were going to have a lot of questions to answer, starting with, why someone or something had gone to all the trouble to modify their DNA sequences, not to mention a whole host of another physical and physiological profiles.
In the back of her mind she began to suspect that General Hammond’s suspicions
regarding a certain Washington D.C politician might actually have been on the mark and if so, it would have a lot more consequences for all of them then just a possible financial shutdown of all activities touching upon of the Stargate Program.
The thing that worried Janet the most was the two almost identical bar codes stamped directly into the skin at the back of the women’s necks. Different numbers for each women, but bearing an uncanny and possibly dangerous resemblance to one another.
Best case scenario, “ Janet dictated into her hand-held recording device, “they’re just part of some sort of international human smuggling/trafficking ring, the victims most likely, or worse, there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye and if so, what do we do about it?’
Conclusion
3 days later
“I’m not sure what to make of this Manticore,” said Sam thoughtfully, “One the one hand the idea that a private organizing not only would have the nerve, wherewithal and the ability to pull a top-secret super soldier breeding program is one thing,” she paused and brushed strands of blonde hair away from her eyes,” but to think it actually worked.”
“Aside from the problem I’m having with the idea,” Jack added, standing with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Is there anything Janet can do about the virus Guevara’s carrying, it appears to be dormant at this point, but with the Tok’ra’s advanced medicine, we might be able to help her.”
“I’m not sure, Doctor Jackson, “ Hammond replied. “It’s something that we’ll definitely look into it. Given what we now know about the X-5s and the information provided by Ms. Guevara, it’s within the realm of possibility.”
“I think, super fancy genes or not,” O’Neill added, “I think, when you boil it all down to the nitty-gritty, I think they just want to be left alone, to live as normal as life as possible for them.”
“Do you think that’s even possible,” asked Daniel.
“I’m not entirely clear in my mind, and this is not a clear-cut case of right and wrong. Manticore, from what I understand is an independent genetic research operation, and it’s got it assets covered, so we can’t just storm the place and shut it down,” Colonel O’Neill said. “As far as anyone knows it does not officially exist.”
“What about Ms. Guevara and Cindy?” Doctor Daniel Jackson asked.
“We could send them to the beta side of the Gate, for their own protection,” Carter suggested, but from what I’ve gathered so far, I very much doubt they would want to go.”
“They have a better than even chance,” Teal’C replied, thinking that the X-5’s and their current troubles seemed not that much different from the troubles of his own people with their former masters, the Gou’ald and the circumstances that had brought him to the attention of SG-1.
In the back of his mind, he thought,’ Things happen for a reason, I must believe that, for how else do you explain why we fight and life, and life to fight another day.’
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