As the team of agents burst into the home, the new recruits gathered here in the auditorium held their collective breath, and Caleb Crowe — leader of the Stargate Program, long-time reluctant psychic and remote-viewer, fought back his own doubts. Not so much as to the outcome of the current mission on-screen. For that, he had the utmost confidence in his teammates who had had their visions backed up by multiple double-blind objectives as well as those of several other members’, including Orlando Natch and Caleb’s own son, Alexander. The little girl was most definitely in this house, hopefully still alive; but Caleb’s doubts ran more along the course of whether or not, despite two years at the helm of this program, despite dozens of just such successes — triumphing in the impossible and providing life-saving results and proving his team’s worth over and over — he was the person best suited for this role.
Just two years ago he had been entrusted with this noble-but necessarily secret operation, ostensibly a program shut down in 1995, but continued under the radar by a man who had used promising test subjects (Caleb’s family notable among them) for his own grand purpose as a self-styled savior of humanity; George Waxman had attempted to preserve the world by destroying exactly these such capabilities in anyone else, and blocking access to visions and psychic experiences that he felt could be used for evil. Caleb had then attempted to continue the fight after Stargate’s cleansing and (supposed elimination), this time with a smaller group of trusted psychics: his sister Phoebe and her now-husband Orlando Natch among them. They had tried to safeguard the treasure they had discovered under the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse — not a treasure of gold and jewels as many had hoped, given Alexander the Great’s legacy — but instead a treasure trove of wisdom—scrolls, books on science of metaphysics, much of it wildly ahead of not only its time but even this time, passed down from ancients. During those years, operating with a small team of psychics called the Morpheus Initiative, he had learned of an ongoing feud between ancient philosophies, and possibly more ancient races, over the fate humanity; and Caleb once again found himself in a pivotal role. And once again, he chose to protect the greater good and destroy the Emerald Tablet, the one artifact that promised so much for man’s evolution, rather than have it be used for dark purposes. In the aftermath of such a costly victory, he had been entrusted with the Keys to the Kingdom, so to speak.
Stargate.
It was his. His to mold, to shape and to direct into a future. With the almost unlimited resources of a black budget, he had still been careful, proceeding while carrying the ghosts of suspicion — and a bit of paranoia. He had been burned before by those he thought friends, by those who had promised their trust and a shared vision, but in the end had been anything but truthful.
And nowhere could he be more careful than with new recruits. He constantly analyzed the prospective members, gauging their pasts, their motives, even spending valuable time devoting several psychics just to such a task, delving into their backgrounds just as if they had to weed out prospective jury members for a life-or-death trial.
Like those here with him today. They represented the future of Stargate and the Morpheus Initiative, and there was never a greater chance to make an impression than the present.
Caleb returned his attention to the screen, to the tense movement inside the house as the occupants — a middle-aged perfect suburban couple — screamed in shock at the intrusion, and professed innocence over the shouts and thumping of boots. This doesn’t look good, Caleb thought, trying to make sense of the jumbled images, the shadows and flurry of bodies.
Multiple shouts of “Clear!” sounded, and then the lead agent looked into the camera, shaking his head. “Nothing, she’s not here.”
“Aren’t those the parents?” someone asked behind Caleb, but he just held up a hand.
“Wait.” He looked closer at something over the lead’s shoulder. “Agent McKinney?”
“Yeah? Make it quick. If you have something, better tell us now or I’m saying we’re in trouble. They’re calling their lawyer.”
Caleb scanned the area on the screen. “Behind you. That orange thing on the fireplace.”
He turned around and the cameraman followed, zeroing in on the target — a fist-sized clay art sculpture of a clown fish. “Nemo?” Caleb whispered.
“Put that down,” someone in the house insisted, and the agent set it down, after holding it up to the camera for a moment first.
Caleb blinked, thinking hard, then remembering. He spun around and leaned over the table near the podium, a surface littered with pages and pages. Drawings all done in different hands, sketched by fledgling as well as more seasoned members of the Stargate team.
He found what he was looking for and held it up, then slapped it down on a projector, sending the visual to a side screen. And for a moment only, it was as if he stood in front of his students at Columbia, his first position out of grad school, teaching Archaeology and Alignments 102. A lifetime ago, before Alexandria and before the Keepers. “Class, look at this… One of our field agents, asked to focus on the objective of finding little Tina Albertson, drew what’s clearly that same object. It’s without color so I didn’t make the connection at first. But it’s clearly Nemo, the fish, and what’s more, these arrows…”
A series of harsh, hardened lines and points all converged downward in arcs away from the fish, at first giving the impression that the creature was swimming as natural as can be, but determined and fast, downward.
Amid some murmuring, Caleb turned back around and adjusted the volume on his microphone. “Agent McKinney?”
The cameraman had lost sight of the lead agent, and instead was heading toward the front door, following the others who had packed up and were making for the exit.
“Yes?”
“Don’t leave. She’s there.”
“What?”
“The fireplace.” Caleb swallowed hard. He knew how this was going to end, and he knew, just as certainly as he knew that whoever had drawn this image certainly had the gift and had just made the next level as far as he was concerned. Tina’s parents had spun a tale of tragedy and loss, of kidnapping to cover up abuse, neglect and possibly much worse. The only question remained: was she still alive?
“Move it,” Caleb instructed. “There should be…”
But Agent McKinney was already on it. Maybe he had seen the crack in the floor, and as soon as Caleb directed his attention there he was in motion, pushing then pulling one side of the fireplace, which sure enough proved to be a façade. Nothing in there but decorative logs anyway, now it slid aside in a grinding noise that revealed a trap door below.
A woman screamed out, and a blur rushed in front of the camera, only to be subdued and pulled aside by other dark blurs as McKinney yanked hard on the latch and lifted the door. After securing it upright, he descended.
A tense minute followed, punctuated by a woman’s cursing and man yelling at her to keep quiet… and then McKinney rose, unsteadily into the camera’s vision.
He was holding a little girl. Malnourished, drugged for sure. Bruises and scrapes, burns and marks on her arms, it looked like she hadn’t seen the outside of a prison cell — or cage — in weeks.