Woolsey looked at him like he was needlessly muddying the waters. Which he was. Jack shut up.
“And so we did not lower the shield when the message came in from New Athos. We responded by radio with assurances that a team would be on the way until the transmission ceased on the other end,” Woolsey said.
“And why did you provide them with the vital information that we were about to send men through the Stargate?” Shen asked.
Woolsey’s mouth twitched. “Because,” he began.
S.R. Desai, the Indian representative, folded his hands on the table before him. “I don’t believe that our new colleague, Mr. Martin, has actually heard the message in question. Perhaps it would be instructive to play it for him so that he can better understand the decisions that were before Mr. Woolsey in the moment.”
Shen pursed her lips. “We all have a transcript,” she said shortly. “I don’t see that we need to waste…”
“It’s a proper request,” Desai said mildly.
“I’m happy to provide that if it’s necessary,” Jack said, not looking at Desai. He thought he understood what he was up to. He glanced at the officer at the back of the room. “Colonel Davis, would you play the sound file in question?”
It only took Davis a minute. He was good.
“Atlantis, you have to help us!” A panicked voice, a young man, his voice breaking on the edge of terror. “We have Darts… I don’t know how many! They’re… “ A sob, a scream as though someone in the background cried out in mortal terror. It echoed through the gray and white conference room, cutting like the stench of blood. LaPierre’s hands clenched on the arms of his chair, and Anderson, silent beside the coffee service, raised her chin. “Please! You have to help us! Atlantis…” It faded in a burst of static. The Atlantis controller’s calm voice could still be heard. “New Athos? New Athos? Can you hear us? New Athos? We are sending a team with all possible dispatch. Can you hear us?” An accented voice, quiet behind hers, Dr. Zelenka. “I do not think they can. Bùh jim pomoz.”
Davis turned off the recording.
“Perhaps that answers your question, madam?” Desai asked Shen. “I think it is helpful, do you not, Mr. Martin?”
“Very helpful,” Martin said. He frowned down at his briefing book as Anderson silently refilled his coffee, decaf, as he’d said.
Nechayev’s eyes met Jack’s, a flash of amusement there. “So now that we have established why New Athos was informed that our gate team was coming, let us move to what happened when they arrived…”
Lt. Colonel Davis was doing a good job of showing the IOA members out, and Jack smiled and let him do it. That was what they paid Davis for. Woolsey was last, his leather briefcase in hand, raincoat over his arm, hanging back. Outside the full glass windows the evening rush hour traffic crept up Massachusetts Avenue toward Columbus Circle, red tail lights bright in the gathering dark.
“You ok?” Jack asked Woolsey quietly.
Woolsey gave him a sideways glance. “I think I’d rather be interrogated by Replicators again, frankly.”
“I hear you.” Jack looked at the retreating backs of S.R. Desai and Aurelia Dixon-Smythe as Davis herded them past the security desk.
Woolsey took a deep breath as they disappeared around the corner. “I was thinking… Do you want to go across the street to Capital City Brewery and get some dinner?”
Which translated as let’s spend three hours with you holding my hand while we rehash every word of the hearing. Jack thought another fifteen minutes would have him screaming in a decidedly un-Air Force way.
“Actually, I’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up,” he said. “This has eaten my whole day. I should probably just take the laptop home and nuke something rather than go out, Dick.”
“Sure,” Woolsey said. He looked kind of crestfallen, and for a moment Jack almost said to hell with it. But three more hours of how the IOA sucked?
“Another time,” Jack compromised. “They’ve got good steaks.”
“Yeah.” Woolsey nodded and squared his shoulders. “I should be getting home too. Not that I’ve got paperwork from Atlantis…”
Before they started another round of speculation there, Jack headed for the glass conference room doors. “I’ve got to run by my office and get my laptop.”
“Ok. See you later.” Woolsey looked out the window. “It’s stopped raining.”
“Good,” Jack said.
There was the distant rumble of thunder off to the west as Jack left the building, putting on his cover absently while glancing up at the sky with a lifetime’s force of habit. Thunderclouds building again to the northwest, catching the updrafts over the edge of the Appalachian front beyond the horizon, away from the microclimate of the river. Thirty minutes, forty. Plenty of time.
It was only eight blocks to his apartment, two rooms whose rent at three times the price of his mortgage in Colorado Springs was supposedly justified by granite countertops. He wouldn’t miss this when it was time to retire. Eight blocks, enough to provide a little aerobic exercise. Something he got less of now that he ended fewer reports with ‘we retreated to the Stargate under fire.’
He changed clothes and put some random dinner something in the microwave, then opened the fridge again. Why not? He pulled out a beer and popped it open just as there was a huge crash of thunder and the lights went out.
“Aw, crap.”
He went over to the floor to ceiling windows in the alcove with the dinette table and looked out just as the first spray of rain dashed against them, the fall thunderstorm he’d seen coming breaking over the city. Horns honked eight stories below, the swirling raindrops illuminated by the bright headlights of a big red Circulator bus, opening doors between stops to let two dashing women with their purses over their heads onboard. The traffic lights were out, and the lights across the street, but up toward the Hill the lights were on, streetlights two blocks away. Just the local transformer then. Well, he could wait for dinner.
Jack sat down at the dinette table with his laptop and opened it, behind glass as microdrafts threw rain horizontally against the window.
September 22, 2009
Hey, Carter…
…you’ve been missing for twenty six days now. Well, not missing missing. Not MIA. Just disappeared. You’re probably perfectly fine. You, and your ship and Atlantis. Everybody’s perfectly fine. It’s probably just something wrong with the Atlantis gate or something, so that you can’t dial in and send a databurst.
It’s probably not that it’s been destroyed. That the Hammond’s been destroyed. I’m sure everybody’s ok.
We had Woolsey’s second hearing today.
And there wasn’t much to say about that. There wasn’t much he could tell her that wouldn’t look like stuff above her grade level when it went through Landry and Caldwell and everybody else, wasn’t stuff Walter needed to know for water cooler gossip at the SGC. And if she never read it…
He wasn’t going there.
It was pretty interesting. Don’t know how it will all come out.
Translation: it sucked, and they’re probably going to sack him. Jack took a long drink of his beer. Probably he should have gone to dinner with Woolsey. He’d get some dinner that way.
But he might also kill him, which would be bad. He wasn’t sure who he could really stand to see right now.
It’s raining here, a hell of a thunderstorm. The power’s out, but I’m on the laptop. Dick says to give you his best.
Well, he would say it. Although he’d probably say something like “Do you think they’re all right?” and Jack would have to say, “Sure, of course they are. Just because they disappear for a month or so doesn’t mean a thing. This is Carter and Sheppard. They’re fine.”