The fountain pen hovered over the second syllable of the marginal note in cursive that Drew Ramsey would never see.
The chamber was not lit by the standard Goa'uld torches; Ba'al kept three small oil lamps on the writing table because the oil lamps were a habit from a body he had worn nine hundred years ago that he had not yet bothered to break. The desk was teak. The chair was carved. The Tok'ra-defector dossier was open at page three. Drew Ramsey's photograph — a Walter-grade SGC personnel image, six months old, three months out of date — was clipped to the inside cover.
Ba'al wrote the second syllable.
The man does not yet know he is interesting.
He read the sentence back. He laughed. The laugh was a quarter octave higher than his speaking voice and it began before the second syllable of interesting was finished. He brought the laugh down before it had time to be heard outside the chamber. He capped the pen. He set the pen across the closed cover of the dossier. He took the small piece of paper on which he had written the marginal note and folded it in thirds and placed it inside the dossier between pages four and five, where it would be found by the next reader who opened the file in his absence and where the next reader would not know whether the note had been left there by accident.
He pressed the chamber's signal stone.
The First Prime entered.
"My lord."
"Tell Mehet that we are pleased with his initial proposal. Authorization to probe the outer survey arc of the Tau'ri claimant is granted. One survey team. Minor casualties acceptable. We will assess based on response shape."
"My lord. The Tau'ri claimant by name?"
"Ramsey."
"Yes, my lord."
The First Prime bowed and left. Ba'al picked up the pen, uncapped it, and signed the authorization on the parchment at the corner of the desk. The signature was the long Ba'al glyph that no Tok'ra defector had yet sold.
He put the pen down. He returned to the dossier. He opened it again. He read the photograph.
He laughed once more. Quietly. To himself. The laugh began, again, half an octave too early.
The strategic display in the SRD office went red at 0642.
I was at the desk with a coffee that I had brewed at 0617 and not yet drunk. The display's red was the SRD interface's unallocated-threat color — a specific carmine I had selected at the original interface tuning because I had wanted unallocated threat to be unmistakable, and the carmine sat now along an arc of seven survey vectors I had not projected, and I hated the color the way a man hates a thing he chose without expecting to ever see it.
The arc lit at vector four. Vector four was the survey team approach to a candidate seventh claim, a low-density mineral world AURORA-7 had filed under background prospect, low priority eleven days ago.
Drew.
"On screen."
Status report from the survey team interrupted at 0641:17. Three personnel. No follow-up signal at 0641:22 check window. No follow-up signal at 0641:27. No follow-up signal at 0641:32.
I was already moving. The corridor between my office and the gate room was forty meters and I covered it in twenty-six seconds. Kawalsky was at the gate room console before I got there. Walter was beside him. Walter had the survey team manifest pulled up on his secondary screen.
"Names," I said.
"Lieutenant Sarah Halpern. Sergeant Mike Boetcher. Specialist Jay Romero." Kawalsky did not look up from the console. "Halpern's the team lead. They were forty minutes into a perimeter scan."
"Recovery."
"I'll lead. My SG team plus two from SG-3. Sixty minutes to gear up."
"Authorized."
He looked up at me. Just once. He held the look for half a beat. Then he was moving.
I did not go to the gate room when Kawalsky's team dialed out at 0742. I stood in the SRD office in front of the strategic display and watched the carmine arc on vector four. AURORA-7 ran the predictive overlay quietly at the bottom of the display, the projection cones for the Goa'uld-class signatures my training data could fit, none of them landing on the proxy who had actually authored the strike.
Drew.
"Talk to me."
The proxy signature is not in my baseline. The closest match is a System Lord designation in the Cronus-tributary catalog: Mehet, minor noble, three thousand troops on a single ha'tak. He has never made a move outside Cronus's coalition before today.
"He's not making this move for Cronus."
Cronus is dead.
"I know."
The most probable patron is Ba'al.
"I know."
The strategic display held the carmine. The carmine did not move and did not fade.
I sat down at the desk and opened the Hammond draft and read it for the fourth time today. The third paragraph was still wrong. I did not fix it. I closed the file. I opened the casualty notification forms in the system and pre-filled the first lines on three blank templates and saved them as drafts and did not type the names yet, because there was a one in three chance one of the names was alive and I did not want to write a casualty notification for a person who was alive.
I drank the coffee from 0617. The coffee was cold.
Kawalsky's report came in at 1247. I was on my third coffee. I was at the strategic display. I had not eaten anything.
He was in the briefing room in his off-world fatigues, dirt on the knees, the shoulder strap of his pack still on. He did not sit.
"Two confirmed dead. Halpern and Boetcher. Romero's gone."
"Bodies."
"Halpern was in the open. Energy weapon, standard Goa'uld plasma signature, single contact, center mass. Boetcher was at the tree line, took two contacts, both center mass."
"Romero."
"Pack at the edge of the LZ. Radio in the pack."
"Powered?"
"Powered."
"Channel?"
Kawalsky looked at me.
"SGC-grade encryption. Frequency seven-three-four-two."
I did not say anything for four seconds.
Seven-three-four-two was the survey-team rotation frequency we had pushed to encrypted broadcast six days ago. Six days. The frequency was on no Tok'ra channel that I knew of. It was not on a Serrakin channel. It was on no broadcast we had cleared to any allied force.
"Walter."
Walter was already in the doorway. "Sir."
"Pull the change log on frequency seven-three-four-two. Who authorized, when, who acknowledged. Get me the distribution list of everyone whose ears it was supposed to reach."
"On it."
He went.
Kawalsky's jaw worked. He had not moved from where he stood.
"Drew."
"Yeah."
"This isn't a System Lord poking us. This is somebody who's been reading our paperwork."
"Yes."
"Romero's still missing."
"I know."
He looked at the table. He looked back at me.
"You want me back out there."
"Yes. Not today. Tomorrow at dawn. Take a longer perimeter. I want you to look for the body. If he isn't dead, I want you to know that before I have to write his family."
"Yes sir."
He left. He had said sir to me twice in twenty years of Earth-Kawalsky friendship. He had said it both times this month.
I stood in front of the strategic display at 1330 and put my hand on the console rail and watched the carmine arc on vector four. The unallocated-threat color sat there like a small wound on the map. AURORA-7 had run the predictive overlay seven times in the last hour and had not landed on a probability cone with confidence above forty percent. The proxy was a name without a behavior model.
My left thumb was on my right forefinger. I did not feel the motion start. I had been doing it for some seconds before I noticed. The pad of my thumb moved in the slow tight circle it had been making at Janet's screen door, at the conference table opposite Kaleb, at the dinner table opposite Cassandra. The motion was steady. The motion did not stop.
I counted the seconds.
At twenty-one seconds the carmine arc shifted by one degree as AURORA-7's threat-triage subroutine pulled another data layer into the projection. At thirty-four seconds Walter's office sent me an internal memo that I did not open. At forty-two seconds my coffee on the desk made a small wet ring on the unfolded SRD letterhead. At forty-five seconds I noticed it. At forty-seven seconds AURORA-7's voice came up through the office speakers, not through my skull — through the speakers — at a measured volume audible to anyone in the room with me, which was nobody, but which would have been audible.
"Director. Your pattern is escalating."
I stopped my thumb.
I stood very still.
"Thank you, AURORA-7."
"You are welcome."
The speakers went quiet. The strategic display held the carmine. I picked up the coffee cup and set it on a coaster I had not bothered with all morning and walked to the door of the office.
Walter was in the hall.
"Sir."
"Frequency seven-three-four-two."
"I have it." He held the printout. "Authorized by SRD on day fifty-nine. Distributed to thirty-seven SGC personnel, twelve SRD personnel, and one Tok'ra liaison address."
"Aldwin's."
"Aldwin's."
I took the printout. I read it. I read it again. The Tok'ra liaison address was the address that touched a defector intelligence channel that Selmak's council had been hunting for eleven weeks and had not yet closed.
I looked up.
"Get me Jacob. Now."
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