03 - The First Amendment Read Online Free Page A

Hammond would see that O’Neill
just didn’t want the competition, didn’t want anybody who could maybe take his
place one day as the leader of SG-1. O’Neill had told the boss that Morley was
the wrong choice, he had no experience.
    The hell he didn’t. Maybe he’d never been through the Gate before, but he’d
been on plenty of recoveries on Earth. It wasn’t any different just because the
sky was a different color. And he deserved the chance. What happened last time,
in Iraq, well, that wasn’t his fault, and anybody who wanted to give him a fair
shake knew it. The temporary vacancy in the command position for SG-2 was a
godsend.
    He’d argued long and hard for this assignment, and it was all going to go
perfectly. Perfectly. Hammond thought so too, or he wouldn’t have let Morley go.
    The reports all said that the wormhole was cold. At first he’d figured that
was just more bull—making it look harder than it was. But it had come up
again and again, in all the reports from all the teams.
    And whaddaya know, they were right. Damn. For those long minutes—or
was it only seconds? Impossible to tell—he was frozen right down to his
guts. He hoped he still had his weapon—all his weapons. Couldn’t feel
anything.
    But then they’d come out the other side, and for the first time ever, Morley
was on an alien world.
    The first thing he did, as soon as he could feel anything, was spin around
and count his men to make sure they’d all come through okay, make sure the
F.R.E.D. with all their weapons and supplies was there. And the DHD. Had to make
sure they weren’t trapped. Of course, there had been at least two teams through
this Gate already, and the very first probe had verified, but it never hurt to
check.
    O’Neill had gotten caught that way; it wasn’t going to happen to him.
    Yeah, all twenty of them present and accounted for. And there was the DHD. It
looked just as they described it in the reports, a wide round platform with
squares marked by the Goa’uld coordinate symbols, with a big red dome in the
middle, the whole thing standing about a yard high and a yard wide, including
the base column. The face was angled to allow easy access to the thirty-nine
glyphs that surrounded the activating dome.
    That took care of the first two things. The third was detecting the presence
of hostiles. He could afford to make that number three in his hit parade because
he had recent intelligence from the probe. Sure enough, the area around the Gate
was quiet.
    And then he could afford to take a deep breath of the alien air of an alien
world.
    It smelled funny. Like a bowl full of nuts.
    The air was the wrong color, too. Well, not that air could have color,
really, but the sky was a peculiar reddish blue, and he had the feeling he was
looking at things through pink-violet-tinted lenses. At least it was warm, much
warmer than the wormhole; he could feel his face tingling in response to the
higher temperature. His men were looking around, blinking, trying to adjust, and
stumbling their first few steps in a new and heavier gravity. One point two
times Earth, the report had said. Morley had trained with extra weights to
prepare for it.
    But none of that mattered. He’d told Hammond that, and he believed it. What
mattered was the mission.
    “Okay, let’s move out!” His voice sounded different in this air, too, but
that was something else that didn’t matter. His men responded exactly as they
were trained.
    Four members of SG-4 had made it back from P7X-924. They said they’d lost
fourteen more in a pitched battle with Jaffa and natives. There were still at
least three men, last seen being dragged into a native stronghold, whose current
status was unknown. That was the same native stronghold that O’Neill had rhapsodized about being so friendly and
cooperative. Hah.
    SG-1 had made first contact with this world and came back with the message
that all was well, the people of this world were ready