The last time that Simone had eaten pancakes this uniquely terrible, she had been in her home town’s iHop, five days before the health inspectors closed it down. She looked at the flat and faded cakes, slathered in cheap butter and bacon grease, and wondered if it was a good idea to go through a stargate on an empty stomach.
She had been making Stargate references all month, and not a single other person in the staff had laughed. Every egghead, jarhead and brass-balled motherfucker who she had made a crack about ‘Goa’Uld’ with had looked at her with a completely blank expression. She stabbed her fork into the pancake and forced another bite down the hole. Across from her, Technical Sergeant Bobby Martins was cramming the pancakes away while flipping through the specifications on his RPAS-98B. It was a few scales up from a Predator and a few steps below the Starship Enterprise.
“Hey, LT,” Martins said, looking up at her. “Can I ask you something before we go?”
Simone nodded. She knew some under officers – especially those with their Westpoint rings still shiny and new – who would have fainted at the idea of even an NCO asking them any kind of private question. But Simone had dragged her ass through years of hell with the triple targets of being Asian, a woman, and queer as fuck as a common soldier. But here she was, just shy of thirty, and she wasn’t just a Ranger (one of the first female Rangers, to boot) and wasn’t just an officer.
She was also one of the first Americans – military, civilian, or otherwise – who was going to set foot somewhere that wasn't Earth since 1972.
That didn’t mean that she wasn’t going to deck Martins if he asked the same stupid-ass question she had been getting since she stepped out of Fort Benning.
Instead of stupid-ass, Martins just went right to the second question she was hoping not to get asked: “Is it true you punched the ex-President in the face?”
“No,” she said, simply.
She had been fielding that question for the better part of a year and was godallmighty sick of it.
Martins nodded, then shook his head as he flipped the technical manual shut.
“Hey, I didn’t vote for ‘em.”
Simone stuck her fork into her pancakes and decided that she’d rather spend her last morning on Earth making sure that it wasn’t her last morning period. She picked up her plate, gave it to one of the cooks who worked in the mess, then started down the corridors of the corner of Fort Flashpoint. Set up in the wild deserts of Arizona, near the still faintly glowing craters from the atomic bomb tests of the 50s and 60s , Flashpoint was made to be two things.
The first was hard to spot. It had the best counter-orbital surveillance technology that the United States could throw at it. It was mostly underground but it had mesh netting, radar reflective paint and a conventional base built about fifty clicks away to draw attention, everything.
The second was totally secure. This was demonstrated by the fuck-off machine guns that had been positioned behind curved metal plating and bulletproof glass windows. Bored looking enlisted men sat behind them, ready to turn everything in the corridor past them into red hamburger. They came to attention and saluted as Simone walked by. She nodded to them and let them slip back into the mind-numbing tedium of watch. The first intersection split – one way went to the laboratories that had been set up and prepped once the mission went underway. The other went to the armory. There, the twelve soldiers who had been selected, each from a different branch and specialization in a halfway point between bureaucratic dick waggling (“Leave my marines out? Like hell you will!”) and logical extrapolation of the requirements of the mission.
Simone found that she hadn’t been the only one to think of this – and was a bit relieved. Each soldier in the armory had years, if not decades, of experience in being the best men (or women) in the worst places the world could throw at them. They were all lucky on the genetic throw of the dice. None of them had been sick for years, each of them were the top of their physical health. Other than a few minor disorders that were compensated by a level of skill and by a cold blooded risk evaluation, they were all the best that the United States could find.
That included the eggheads. Though Simone sometimes broke out in a cold sweat at thinking about Dr. Cole. She was the best geologist in the field, had the required minimal family attachments, security clearance, basic physical health, and basic level competence in firearms (actually, she was a high sight better than several other members of the science team, being from rural Nebraska.)
The thing that made Simone nervous was that Dr. Cole was diabetic. One of the new, top of the line implanted artificial pancreas sat in her gut. But if that got damaged (and they were more fragile than the organic kind), then Dr. Cole would starve to death surrounded by rations.
But hey, geologist wasn’t mission critical, and Dr. Cole had agreed to the dangers, so…
She went through the stargate.
Simone focused on her chief NCO. Even on a team this small, someone had made sure to cobble together the basic command structure of the military. Her second in command, Sergeant First Class Baker, was the man in charge of turning her orders into nitty gritty ‘you go here’, ‘you do this’ minutia for the rest of the troops. He had been pulled from the SEALs and seemed to think that she, as a Ranger (and possibly all the other uncomplimentary things that Simone was used to dealing with), was barely worth breathing his air. But like any good NCO, he was able to conceal that under a flat affect. Though, Simone thought, it was possible that he had that affect no matter how he felt about his CO.
If that was the case, then she was just being a deeply cynical woman.
She nodded slightly to him – he caught her meaning and looked to the rest of the team. “All right, everyone. Let's start humping the kit to the operations room.”
Within five minutes, the military branch of the operation had gotten their rifles, their ammo, their drones, their rations, their tents. Everything.
Within thirty minutes, the science team had gotten their gear together. Their physicist, their biologist, their surgeon, their sociologist, their geologist, their astrophysicist, all of them with their own idea of what had been absolutely required. The initial lists had been five times as long, and the months of preparation had weaned them slowly down to just a preposterous amount of gear. Simone looked at the pile with an emotion that had once been dread.
But now it was just resignation.
Dr. Cole stepped up to Simone and smiled. “Shall we go over any final notes, Miss, uh, Lieutenant Fong?”
Simone nodded. “All right,” she said, turning to face her men. They were standing at ease – rifles slung around their shoulders, packs on their backs. “We’re going to be heading through first to secure the landing site. Remember, the gate has a divergent landing pattern. Since we’re going through with a one second delay between individuals, the eggheads say that we shouldn’t have more than a fifteen mile difference between landing points. If you can’t check in...” She held up her point to point radio. “Then fire off a flare only if you are in immediate danger. We don’t know what natives we’re going to be running into. We don’t know what their technology is, what their culture, what their language is. All we know is that an American citizen is on the other side. We’re going to bring him home and we’re going to make a great big leap for science.” She grinned. “And if you see any weird snake things. Shoot em.”
“Weird snake things, LT?” Corporal Tanye North asked, her hand going to her rifle.
“It’s just a general piece of good advice, Corporal,” Simone said, rolling her shoulders as she started towards the gate.
The gate itself was not impressive. It hadn’t been impressive when Simone had first seen it, several months ago. Time hadn’t made it seem more intimidating. Take a ring of magnets, wrapped in copper cable like the dynamo of some kludged together electrical engine. Blow it up to be the size of a garage door and connect it to what seemed like every power cable in the world. The complexity was, according to Dr. Fairchild, the team’s astrophysicist, came in the application of energies.
However it worked, Simone knew the basic upshot.
Exotic particles were created and smashed together, creating a rapidly spinning whatsamajiggit that punched a hole through the fabric of space time and would let humans bridge almost four times ten to the ninth power kilometers in a matter of seconds. Faster than light travel to alien planets. It was everything Simone had ever dreamed about when she had been ten.
A warning siren rang out.
“All right, everyone,” Simon called out. “Goggles on.”
She quickly snapped some goggles over her face. The thick, misted lenses made the world seem slightly denatured, as if someone had leached just a tiny bit of color from them. The gate started to whirr. Power cables sparked. Steam hissed from heat-sinks as water boiled while in contact with conductors ramping from room temperature to white hot in a matter of seconds. The whole gate shook with the effort as a whining sound that screeched along the back of Simon’s hearing burned through her brain.
Finally, the gate reached its climax.
Shutters mounted along the interior of the ring snapped open. Exotic particles smashed together in the exact center of the gate. The goggles filtered the blinding colors out of Simon’s vision, leaving only the visual effect of the storm of energy. A pale blue-white sphere exploded out with a sound not unlike a cracking whip, a sound that made her want to flinch and duck for cover. She schooled her expression to remain perfectly still as the swirling sphere flexed and bobbed and rippled with tiny perturbations. She wasn’t sure what they were, but she was sure that Dr. Fairchild would have some kind of long-winded explanation that had too many syllables and jargon for her to follow.
A green light – so similar to the light used to signal the beginning of a paradrop that it almost made her feel comfort rather than terror – flicked on and Simone stepped forward.
First in.
She walked forward, her jaw so taut that she could feel her teeth aching.
And then…
She was ripped to pieces.