The Furies

Chapter Twenty Croatoan

It was good to be home, Steven Caldwell thought, back to the Mountain where the guys on the guardpost didn’t even blink when you and three or four other people appeared out of thin air. Of course, they were expecting him. He’d called in and been ordered to Cheyenne Mountain, but since there were now precautions against beaming down through twenty six levels of substructure, he had to beam to the outside guardpost.

“Colonel Caldwell, sir,” the sergeant on duty said, snapping to attention. “General Landry requests that you report immediately.”

“On my way,” Caldwell said, making his way inside and toward the elevator, followed by his exec. Their Daedalus flight suits were a badge of honor and got quite a few glances among the blue-clad SGC personnel.

He wasn’t surprised that the moment he stepped out of the elevator the first person he saw was Richard Woolsey. Nor was he surprised that right behind him was Lieutenant General O’Neill. And Major General Landry. And Brigadier General Pellegrino.

“Welcome back, Colonel,” O’Neill said.

“Glad to be back, sir,” Caldwell said. He hadn’t expected all the brass from Homeworld Command, but he supposed that he ought to have, even though he’d sent his report ahead. No one with the IOA except maybe technically Woolsey. That would account for debriefing at Cheyenne Mountain. Whatever was going on in Atlantis, O’Neill wanted to keep it a purely Air Force matter as long as he could. Which said something right there.

“If you gentlemen will come this way,” Landry said, shaking his hand, “I’ve got a nice comfortable conference room just over here. Steven, I see your exec there is waving hard copies of your report, but I think it’s safe to say we’ve already read it. I think we’d like to go straight to the Q and A, if that’s ok with you.”

“Of course, sir,” Caldwell said. As though he’d say, no, that’s not ok. I can’t actually answer questions to my boss and my bosses’ boss.

There was the usual muddle as everyone tried to sort themselves out in an unfamiliar conference room by rank, with Landry bumping someone else down the table because O’Neill was standing in front of the end seat like he owned it, and there was a civilian who wouldn’t budge, Dr. Daniel Jackson. Caldwell wondered what the hell Jackson was doing here, but it wasn’t his call.

Eventually everybody settled. Caldwell wished somebody would offer coffee, but nobody did.

“So.” O’Neill steepled his hands on top of the hard copy of the report. “Tell me about Queen Death.” He glanced down the table. “Catchy name. How do they come up with these things?”

Jackson looked over the top of his glasses. “I’ve been saying for years we should rename ourselves Infinitely Evil Space Superiority Command, but nobody listens to me.”

Woolsey cleared his throat. He wasn’t driving the conversation, and that said something important about how things had been going politically on Earth. “Colonel Caldwell?”

“I think we have a serious problem,” Caldwell began.

Jack had come straight from Peterson Air Force Base to Stargate Command, but Daniel hadn’t been needed until Caldwell’s briefing, so he had his car there. Jack thought Daniel waited with admirable patience through the pleasantries afterwards, waited all the way through the familiar ride up in the elevator and the check out through the guardposts. He waited until Jack actually closed the car door.

“When were you planning on telling me?” Daniel said.

“Telling you what?”

“That you’d put my name in to replace Woolsey in Atlantis.” Daniel gave him a sideways glance as he craned his neck to pull out of the narrow parking place.

Jack spread his arms on the broad leather armrests. “Never thought you’d get an SUV. I thought you cared about saving the Earth and all.”

“It’s a hybrid.” Daniel hauled the steering wheel around expertly, managing to get out with at least an inch to spare on Jack’s side. “And you’re not going to get me off topic that easily. What were you thinking, Jack? The IOA hates me about as much as they do…”

“Carter?”

“I was going to say you,” Daniel said. “And she has a first name. You could use it.”

“Force of habit,” Jack said. “And now who’s getting off topic? Look, I know you hate the IOA…”

“What? Because they tried to have me executed a couple of years ago?” Daniel threaded his SUV through the parking lot.

“And you just hold a grudge over a little thing like that.”

“Where to start?” Daniel put on the brake and stopped in the middle of the row. “Janet’s death? Sending agents to dig up dirt on Sam’s private life? Wanting to leave you frozen in stasis forever? Turning a blind eye to Kinsey’s bullying?” He looked at Jack sideways. “I’m a poison pill, aren’t I?”

“Not to Desai,” Jack said. “He loves you. So does Nechayev. For that matter Dixon-Smythe could care less.”

“But you think the rest of them will panic and want Woolsey back.” Daniel shook his head. “Because they think they can’t push me around.”

“They know they can’t push you around,” Jack clarified. “If you were in Atlantis they’d have Elizabeth all over again.”

“She did a fine job,” Daniel said quietly.

“I know.”

Daniel started the car moving again. “It’s not that I mind you using me in your game with the IOA. But I wish you’d tell me first. I’d rather not hear about it from Landry.”

“Sorry about that,” Jack said. He probably should have mentioned it to Daniel. There was no need to play his cards that close to his chest. Force of habit, he supposed, to tell no one anything that wasn’t essential.

Daniel looked mollified. “So do you want to know what I think?”

Jack tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Ok, Daniel. What do you think?” If he really hadn’t wanted to know, he wouldn’t have agreed to let Daniel give him a ride home. The motorpool had cars.

“I think the Atlantis expedition is screwed.” There was the squeal of brakes somewhere behind, but Jack ignored it. It wasn’t as bad as Sam. Daniel drove absentmindedly. Sam drove suicidally. “There’s no will to put into it what it requires, either here or internationally.”

When Jack didn’t reply, Daniel went on, the sound of his window going down as he leaned out to swipe his card to get out of the parking lot. “Croatoan.”

There was a long pause, and it got the response he wanted. Jack opened his eyes and looked over. “What’s a Croatoan?”

“A Native American tribe related to the Pasquotank,” Daniel said. “But it’s also a mystery.”

Jack straightened up in his seat, fishing in his pocket for his sunglasses. The late afternoon sun was coming straight in through the windshield and his eyes were starting to water. They’d been photosensitive for a long time now. “Ok, I’ll bite. What about it, Daniel?”

“Let me tell you a story,” Daniel said, turning onto the expressway. “In 1587 a group of British settlers led by a man named John White, and financed by Sir Walter Raleigh, landed on the island of Roanoke just off the North Carolina coast. They were following up on a previous expedition, also led by White, which had established a temporary camp and begun friendships with the Native Americans who used the island as a summer hunting place. There were no permanent native settlements on the island, for good reasons, as the colonists would learn. These were not the kind of settlers who came later, not the adventurers of Jamestown or the fanatical religious separatists of Massachusetts Bay, looking for a place to practice their strict religion without the fetters of secular law. They were natural scientists, skilled craftsmen, skilled farmers, soldiers. Men and women too who were driven more by the relentless curiosity of the Elizabethan age. Some of White’s papers and drawings survive — beautiful sketches of plants and animals, carefully measured and catalogued according to the best data collection of the day. Translations from the Algonquin language, accurate and sympathetic portrayals of the people they met there, beautifully rendered pictures and stories.”

“You have a point?” Jack asked, more for form’s sake than anything else. Of course Daniel did, and he’d get to it in his own time.

“A few weeks later, White returned to England with the ship to get more provisions, but it was late in the year and they could not sail again until spring. And you know what happened then.”

“I do?”

“1588. The Spanish Armada. When spring came every ship was needed to defend England. The hundred and some members of the Roanoke expedition were not a priority, not when faced with invasion. White hounded the Queen and so did Raleigh, but to no avail. No ships could be spared. By the time the Spanish Armada was finished, the last ships wrecked in the gales of autumn off Scotland, it was too late to sail again. The next year it was the same story. The threat of war kept ships close in, fearing a repeat of the previous year’s battles. It was 1590 when John White and the resupply ship landed at Roanoke. To find the expedition gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone. The settlement had been abandoned. The absence of most of the goods the expedition had brought, as well as the dismantling of some of the buildings, suggested that the expedition had not been attacked, but had moved on for some unknown reason. No bodies, no spent musket balls, no signs of burning or violence. All the clue there was left was the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a tree.”

Jack looked over at him sharply from behind his sunglasses. “Which means?”

“It was the name of a Native American tribe that lived about fifty miles away on the mainland. They’d had good relations with them in the past.” Daniel shrugged. “We don’t know why they left. We do know that the hurricane season of 1588 was exceptionally active, and that the entire island is very low lying. In recent decades it’s been ravaged by hurricanes several times, and structures near where the settlement was were badly damaged. We also know that the Spanish raided along the coast in 1589, searching for a British colony, and that they had already destroyed a French colony in South Carolina. In any event, the island was a very unsafe place to stay. It seems likely that it became untenable, and that they picked up and moved in with their allies.”

“So you’re saying that when we get Daedalus back to Atlantis, we’re going to find the whole place deserted with no clue except New Athos written on a pillar in lipstick?” Jack winced. “That’s comforting, Daniel.”

“I’m not saying that,” he replied tranquilly. “I’m saying that things well begun have been abandoned before because the nation that sponsored them lacked the national will to follow through. Because other things happened at home that made the well being of the expedition a minor priority. Because it simply wasn’t important enough.”

Jack twitched. “Some people would say it’s better that way,” he said. “That it would have been better if there had never been colonies in the New World.”

Daniel glanced at him sideways, a giant truck roaring past him in the outside lane. “Contact between the New World and the Old was going to happen. It was already happening. It had been nearly a century since Columbus, sixty years since the Aztecs fell. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag once it’s out, Jack. You can’t just sail away and forget about it. Do you think for a minute that if we turned off the Stargate and recalled our ships that we would be left alone? That we can ever go back to the way things were? We have to be realistic. We’re part of a wider universe, and you and I have been places that makes those old sea dogs’ adventures pale in comparison.” He looked back at the road. “And you know as well as I do that we’re not the biggest dogs out there. We’re technologically inferior, and our population is a tiny percentage of all sentient species we’ve encountered. We’d like to think we’re the conquistadors, but we’re not. Compared to the Wraith, or to the Jaffa or the Tok’ra here in the Milky Way, we’re some second rate power trying to act real big with a bunch of technology we kind of half understand that we got from the Asgard or dug up from the Ancients. We’re not the Spanish Empire. We’re more like…”

Daniel seemed to run down for a moment, out of an appropriate comparison. “Lichtenstein?” Jack supplied.

“I was going to say the Venetian Republic, or maybe Norway in this period, but that will do.”

“So your point is that we can’t give up.” Jack thought this was a pretty long winded way of getting there.

“My point is that contact is going to happen. The question is what the nature of that contact will be.”

Jack didn’t say anything, which Daniel seemed to take as encouragement.

“Do you think it makes a difference that the predominant strain in the founding of our country was Puritan separatism rather than the broadminded and curious attitudes of the Elizabethan age? Do you think that it’s irrelevant to our national pathologies that we were founded to be a haven for a bunch of nuts who wanted to opt out of secular law and society and create a theocratic state?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you really think, Daniel? An unbiased opinion,” Jack said, his lips twisting in a half smile.

Daniel gave him a dirty look. “I’m not saying I’m unbiased. I’m saying that it was a tragedy for the entire world that the Roanoke colony was not the one that took root. I’m saying that if we drew our heritage from Roanoke instead of Plymouth that we would be a better country and a better people. If our guiding principles were based on the naturalists of the age of Shakespeare, rather than the manifest destiny of a bunch of Calvinists, the entire history of the world from that point on would be much improved.”

“You can’t know that,” Jack said. “Daniel, if there’s one thing we’ve learned seeing all these quantum realities and alternate timelines, it’s that we have no idea how our actions will affect the future. We can’t play that game. We can’t hedge our bets based on some kind of mega end on down the road. We have to play the cards we have, right here and right now. We can’t get into the whole ‘ends justify the means’ based on social theories of what will be better in three or four hundred years.”

“All right, how’s this for the short term?” Daniel glanced at him sideways again, apparently oblivious to the dump truck riding up on his back bumper. “The Austerlitz will launch in eighteen months. You know India’s research ship is right behind them. The Russians want more Stargate access, and they’re going to get it because they’re chipping in money we can’t afford. Meanwhile, our budget is flat for the next fiscal year and the Pentagon is planning a surge in Afghanistan. Your point about Atlantis?”

“My point is that we can’t determine whether or not humans from the Milky Way have contact with the Pegasus Galaxy. That’s out of our hands. What we can determine is what the guiding principles of these first contacts are. Who goes and what do they do? How do we respond to the peoples already there? How do we deal with the Wraith? What do we do about the rogue Asgard already in Pegasus? How do we safeguard the legacy of the Ancients so that it is available to all their heirs?” He shook his head. “We can’t abrogate that responsibility, Jack.”

“I never said we should.”

“You said…”

“I said I don’t make the budget. That’s the President and Congress. And I don’t determine the military priorities of the country. That’s way above my pay grade.”

Daniel snorted. “I thought that third star was good for something.”

“It occasionally gets me drinks with pretty girls.” Jack glanced out the window at the exit coming up. “Look, I can’t control the IOA. I can’t make them invest in Atlantis in the middle of an international economic crisis. All I can do is deal with our starships. Such as we have. As few as we have. Right now, 25 % of our force is sitting in Atlantis. Daedalus will be on her way back as soon as she’s repaired. That’s what I’ve got, Daniel.” His voice was harder than he wanted it to be.

“I know,” Daniel said more gently. “Believe me, I know you’re doing everything you can.”