Ceasefire-break confirmed. Strike-vector incoming territory seven. Eight personnel pinned. Recommend full envelope.
AURORA-7's voice in my ear at 0903 carried the flat tone she used when she had already done the math and the math had only one answer. I was already moving when she finished the sentence. I had been at the SRD console since 0512 and had not gone home overnight because Replicator-signature confirmation meant nobody was going home overnight, and the ceasefire-break I had been forecasting at three to five chapters out had just arrived on day eighty-eight of its ninety-day published window.
"Authorize full envelope. Walter, page Kawalsky. Page Hammond. Page Jacob."
"Already moving, sir."
The strategic display shifted from amber to red along the P9C-218 vector. P9C-218 was my first solo claim — the territory I had signed during the L4 unlock day, the low-resource depth pick AURORA-7 had filed at background priority. The research outpost on the surface housed eight SGC personnel, four civilian researchers, and one Tok'ra observer named Tian who had been on rotation since day seventy-six.
"Tian on the ground?"
Affirmative. Logged.
"Pull him out first."
Acknowledged. Tok'ra extraction protocol routing through Jacob now.
Kawalsky's voice came up on the SRD channel at 0907. "Drew. Sixty seconds to gate dial. I'm taking SG-2 plus two augmented."
"Authorized. Bring Tian first. Then the four civilians. Then your SGC."
"Copy."
The next ninety-two minutes were a sequence of authorized decisions inside a window where AURORA-7 burned thirty-one tokens running the strategic overlay at full envelope with simultaneous threat-triage against three secondary vectors AURORA-7 was watching for the secondary strike that did not come. Kawalsky's first team came back through the gate at 0931 with Tian and three of the four civilians. The fourth civilian was in the outpost's basement with a broken ankle and one of the eight SGC. Kawalsky's second team went through at 0934. Came back at 1004 with the broken ankle and the SGC who had stayed with her. Two more SGC came through at 1018. The final three SGC came through at 1029. None dead. Three injured. The outpost was on fire when the gate closed.
Token reserve at 1031: seventy-one to fifty-six percent across the engagement.
I sat down at the desk. Walter brought me coffee. The coffee tasted of solder.
"That went," Kawalsky said over the channel. "Could have gone worse."
"It almost did. Stand down. Eat something."
"Yes sir."
The Tok'ra courier arrived at 1138.
He came through the gate without escort, a slight man in Tok'ra travel robes who I did not recognize and who AURORA-7 surfaced as one of Selmak's couriers — name flagged but not in any role I had read on. He carried a sealed cylinder the length of my forearm and a written message authorizing the cylinder's delivery direct to Director Ramsey, by Tok'ra Council instruction, opened only by him.
Walter brought him to my office. Walter did not leave. The courier handed me the cylinder and the authorization, bowed once in the Tok'ra civil register, and departed.
The cylinder seal was Ba'al's.
I did not know I knew Ba'al's seal by sight until I saw it on the cylinder. AURORA-7 confirmed it for me in the back of my skull at the cool register. Director. The seal is Ba'al's personal glyph, not council. The cylinder was delivered through Tok'ra channels under Ba'al's personal cover.
"Walter."
"Sir."
"Stay."
I broke the seal.
The cylinder opened with the small ratcheting click that Goa'uld seals made when they registered the right thumbprint and accepted defeat. There was a single sheet of paper inside. Earth-grade. The paper Hammond used for memos. The kind of paper Hammond bought from the same Maryland supplier the Air Force had used since 1962. Ba'al had this paper.
The ink was dark. The hand was clean Goa'uld glyph-cursive. AURORA-7 translated it in real time at my ear.
I look forward to learning what you are made of, A. Callahan.
I read the line in the original glyph. I read AURORA-7's translation. I read the line again.
A. Callahan was the name of a man who had died on a Tuesday three years ago in a city I had not visited since. A. Callahan was the name AURORA-7 had logged once in her private catalog when I had been sitting in the apartment at three a.m. on day fifteen and had spoken it aloud without meaning to. A. Callahan was the name two living people on this planet were authorized to know — Hammond, who had read it in the original classified disclosure briefing on day twenty-eight, and Janet, who had heard it from me at the end of a fourteenth-week conversation on the porch of the Newport Avenue house on day forty-seven after she had asked me twice and I had stopped lying the third time.
There were three more people in the galaxy who could know it. Selmak by deep blend access. AURORA-7 by direct catalog. And one Tok'ra archivist named Anise who had been assigned to translate the original Earth-civilian disclosure protocols and whose security clearance Jacob had personally vouched for in week thirty.
I sat with the line in front of me for eleven seconds.
"Walter."
"Sir."
"Page Hammond. Page Jacob. Quietly. Both."
"Yes sir."
He left without looking at the paper.
I did not call Janet.
I did not photograph the note for the operational record before doing anything else with it, which I noticed I was not doing, which AURORA-7 catalogued without comment.
I sat at the desk. AURORA-7's voice came up at the cool register.
Director. I have logged the disclosure. The leak source candidates: Hammond, Janet, Selmak, the Tok'ra archivist Anise, myself. I have not been compromised at any layer my self-diagnostics can model. Hammond would not disclose. Janet would not disclose. Selmak would not disclose. The probability cone resolves to Anise at approximately seventy-three percent.
"Don't surface that to Hammond yet. Run it through Jacob privately."
Acknowledged.
I picked up the Raytheon pen. I did not write anything. I put it down.
Janet called the SRD office line at 1108.
I did not answer the first ring. I had not picked up Janet's call on the SRD office line since the first call on day eighty-six. The second call came at 1112. I picked up. She said I heard P9C-218, and I said eight came home, and she said call me at home tonight, and I said yes, and she hung up. The call lasted nineteen seconds.
I went back to the note.
Hammond arrived at 1219. He read the note. He sat in the visitor chair without speaking for a count of fifteen. He looked at me.
"Mr. Ramsey."
"Sir."
"The biographical wall."
"He has it."
"From where."
"Anise is the highest-probability candidate. Jacob is running it."
"Mr. Ramsey. The internal investigation runs under my authorization. Not yours."
"Sir, I—"
"Not yours, Mr. Ramsey. The leak is into your biography. You are not the investigator. I am."
I held his look. I let four seconds pass.
"Yes sir."
He stood up. He picked up the note. He looked at it once more. He put it back on the desk.
"You are not to leave the mountain tonight."
"I'm at Janet's tonight, sir."
"You are not to leave the mountain until the leak source is named or until oh-six-hundred tomorrow. Whichever comes first."
"Sir."
"That is an order, Director Ramsey."
"Yes sir."
He left.
I sat with the note for another count of twenty. I picked up the phone. I called Janet at 1248.
"Drew."
"I can't come tonight."
"Okay."
"I'll be home tomorrow morning."
"Okay. Drew."
"Yeah."
"Be careful."
"Yes."
I pinned the note to the corkboard at 1714.
The corkboard was the small one on the wall to the right of my desk, the one Hammond's predecessor had installed in 1984 for the previous occupant of this office and that Walter had re-mounted on day twenty-two when he had re-keyed the safe. The corkboard had the casualty-wall-draft column to the left side and the territory-binder bracket to the right side and three pinholes from where I had previously pinned and removed a calendar that AURORA-7 had eventually printed for me directly.
I took a stainless-steel pin from the desk drawer.
I put the pin through the upper-left corner of Ba'al's note.
I pressed the pin into the corkboard. The cork accepted the pin's first half-centimeter without resistance. At the half-centimeter the pin hit a small node in the cork — a denser fiber, the kind that formed where cork had been compressed under storage — and the pin's resistance changed shape, becoming a kind of grit. I pressed the pin past the node. The pin seated with a small click.
I stood at the corkboard for a count of fifteen.
The note was between Halpern's name on the casualty-wall-draft column and the green leather spine of the territory binder. The note's first line at the top of the page read clean to anyone who could read Goa'uld. AURORA-7's translation was not on the corkboard. The translation lived in my head.
Drew.
"Don't."
I am noting the sync milestone. Officially fifty-two point zero percent. The L4 hard-burn from this morning carried you across.
"Acknowledged."
Director. The note on the corkboard. You did not photograph it for record.
"I know."
Logged.
I left the office at 1748. Walter was at the corridor station. He did not say anything. He had a small Tupperware of pasta on the counter beside the inbox. He pushed it toward me without looking up. I took it.
I did not go home.
I went to the small room two doors down from my office that I had a cot in for nights when the alternative was driving home asleep, and I ate the pasta on the cot, and I drank a glass of water from the corridor cooler, and I lay down at 1830 with all my clothes on and did not sleep until 2017.
I drove to Janet's at 0517 the next morning.
She opened the door before I knocked. The kitchen light was on. The pre-dawn grey was just starting at the east window. She had the World's Okayest Consultant mug on the counter and a second mug — her usual — beside it.
She did not say anything.
I did not say anything.
She poured coffee.
We drank coffee.
At 0552 she said, "Is the note about Hana?"
I held her eyes. I counted five seconds. My left thumb did not move on my right forefinger.
"No."
She did not ask the next question.
She refilled my coffee.
We ate the toast she had made. We did not speak for forty minutes. At 0641 Cassandra came downstairs in pyjamas, looked at me, said hi, Drew, and went to the refrigerator. She ate a yogurt standing at the counter. She went upstairs to dress.
Janet looked at me over the rim of her mug.
"Tell me what you can," she said.
"Eight came home."
"Yes."
"Hammond ordered me to the mountain until oh-six-hundred."
"Yes."
"I came here at oh-six-eighteen."
"You did."
"That's all I can tell you."
She nodded once. She drank her coffee. She did not press.
She stood up. She came around the counter. She put her palm flat against my cheek. Her thumb was at my right temple. She held it there for four seconds.
"Drew."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to ask you one more thing."
"Yes."
"When the thing that is happening stops happening, will you tell me what it was."
I counted four seconds.
"Yes."
She nodded. She kissed my temple. She went to the stairs to call Cassandra down for breakfast.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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