NationStates Jolt Archive

(OOC: This is setting the scene for a partial MT/FT crossover, allowing me to do some limited FT RP through the use of the Stargate system; like how the US program is done on the series. I may open it partially later, but untill then please enjoy the writing.)

The C-110 gunned its motor as it shifted gears, tackling the bottom of the incline with the dogged determination of a military transport. The headlights of the truck barely pierced the airborne moisture created by the swamps of southern Georgia, giving the fading evening light a surreal complexion.

The occupants of the truck had more important things on their minds however; inside the cab, a young Sergeant glanced nervously from the corner of his eye at the Major that sat in the second seat, before glancing back at the road in an effort to keep the vehicle on course. “We should see the turn-off soon, Major,” he said a moment later.

Major Charleston merely grunted in response. The middle-aged, weary-eyed man reclined in his seat, a chewed cigar between his lips sending wisps of cacogenic fumes into the air above him, his dress jacket buttoned loosely in a fashion suggesting hurried application. The Major had been off-duty for two hours before being called back on this issue, and had been nursing his third Whisky by that point. A flask sat in his inside pocket as a rebellious message to those who had cruelly interrupted his night of enjoyment in one of the many brothels that had sprung up following their legalisation.

The truck turned off the paved road down a dirt-track partially hidden by undergrowth and the swamp gasses, and a platoon of Confederate Army infantry saluted the truck as it passed. The Major glanced in the side mirror as they passed; the soldiers had set themselves up in a defensive position against any unwarranted approach – the Joint Chiefs were not taking any chances with whatever this thing was.

The truck continued along the path, now moving downwards at an angle, slipping occasionally on the soft mud. The Sergeant smiled apologetically at the superior officer each time it happened, which Charleston ignored.

Presently, the truck cleared the dirt-track and entered a clearing. Nearly a hundred soldiers were present, with floodlights surrounding the perimeter pointing onto the object of contention. The truck pierced the outer line of troops and rolled to a stop several metres from the object.

Major Charleston sighed, reaching into his pocket and tasking the flask to his lips. The acrid whisky made him wince as he replaced the cap and concealed the container once more, before then opening the cab door and stepping down onto the unsteady ground.

Nearby, a Captain from the Confederate Marine Corps saw Charleston approach and stood to attention stiffly, saluting. Charleston returned the gesture in a casual fashion, squinting at the name on the front of the Marine’s combat jacket. “At ease…Geoffreys,” he said finally. Turning to the excavation site, he cleared his throat, his vocal chords still burning from the liquor. “So what do we have here?”

Captain Geoffrey’s wrinkled his nose at the stench of alcohol once the Major had turned away, and then composed himself before stepping forward. “Sir, one of our Uranium excavation teams was performing a routine dig in this area when they struck upon something odd.”

Charleston sighed, rubbing his eyes in a tired fashion. “Don’t keep me in suspense, Captain,” he said. “What is it?”

Geoffreys bit his tongue, despising the impertinence of the part-time Confederate Army officer. “We don’t know at this time, Sir,” he said in level tone. “We can’t even tell what it’s made of.”

Major Charleston looked at the Marine with a puzzled scowl. “What the hell are you talking about, son?” He began stepping forward. “Let me see this thing.”

With an inward sigh, the Marine stepped into line with the Colonel as they approached the edge of the excavation area. The hole was roughly circular in shape, almost half a mile across, and heading deep into the ground. Idle excavation equipment stood nearby from the Uranium team’s efforts, now occupied by Confederate Army and Marine personnel.

Reaching the lip of the excavation, the Major peered down into the hole, squinting against the glare of several large spotlights that had been aimed into the centre of the chasm. Taking a moment to allow his eyes to adjust, he then frowned as he saw the object clearly. “What the hell is that?”

The object in question was a large circle, several dozen metres in radius. Ornate carvings, dusty but visible, lined the circumference of the ring, interrupted by blood coloured chevrons at regular intervals around the inner area of the object. It looked ancient; its carvings were scratched in several places, and it had obviously been buried here for a considerable time.

The two men stood in silence for several moments, bonded in mutual bafflement of the unknown. The sound of a motor roaring to life interrupted their reverie, and Charleston looked up to see a crane being moved towards the site.

Captain Geoffreys glanced at the crane also. “The Joint Chiefs want this thing moved to Camp Black for immediate analysis,” the Marine said by way of explanation. Fishing in his pocket, he handed the Major a piece of paper. “These orders also seem to include you as an Army observer.”

Charleston nodded, glancing at the paper. The faded light and the whisky caused the letters to move unsteadily. “Yes, I received my brief earlier tonight,” he said, handing the papers back to the Marine as he remembered being interrupted in entertaining a high class Call Girl by two Lieutenants of the Confederate Army.

“So,” he said, reaching into his pocket and taking another draw from the flask, much to the Marine’s disgust. “Let’s get this thing on the road.”

-*-

Three Weeks Later
-*-

Camp Black was a large facility several miles south-west of Albany, almost straddling the Alabaman Border. Surrounded by a no-fly radius of twenty miles and a military patrol zone of ten miles, Camp Black consisted of two airliner-capable runways, several large hangers, a half a dozen smaller buildings and did not officially exist.

To the Learjet descending onto Runway 2L, this was of no concern. The drab military green exterior was interrupted by the large Confederate Cross on either wing, denoting its connections with the Confederate Air Force. The jet flared momentarily before touching down, wheels squealing as the aircraft braked to taxi towards a parking ramp.

Spooling down its engines, the jet lowered its access ramp as a group of Base Security assembled in parade-fashion, their jet-black uniforms contrasting the olive green dress uniform of the Confederate Marine that stepped off the plane. Lieutenant-General Zack Holloway squinted in the sun before stepping down the ladder to the tarmac and receiving the salute of Colonel Marcus Ram, Base Commander. The two officers than turned, flanked by their own troops, and walked for several moments in silence.

It was Holloway who spoke first. The Lieutenant-General glanced sidelong at the Camp Black Commander, dressed in a contrasting black uniform to denote the installation’s separation from the regular operations of the Confederate military. “The power requirement report of this thing was correct?” he asked doubtfully.

Ram nodded as the group turned a corner and approached one of buildings. The heat of the tarmac beat down on the group, creating illusions at the edges of the horizon. “We hooked it up to a power source, flicked the switch and nothing happened,” he said as the group entered the air-conditioned foyer of the building. A Watch Officer saluted them as they passed. “The power levels required to run get this thing online required us to switch the entire of Kennedy Power Station to the base’s main grid.”

Holloway looked at the man incredulously. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

The Colonel led them to an elevator. After entering, he keyed in a pass-code onto the elevator panel. As the car began moving downwards, the Colonel removed his hat momentarily and rubbed his brow. “It was only then that we discovered what it did,” he said. Seeing the General’s puzzled expression, he elaborated. “Whatever passes for a computer system in that thing had been left with a key combination in its long-term memory before being shut down.”

Holloway frowned. “Key combination?”

Ram nodded. The elevator stopped, and the group stepped out into a long, semi-circular corridor and turned right. “It turns out the symbols around the edges of the object are an address code, like on a telephone,” the Colonel continued. “When we activated the object, it dialled out the combination that had been left in its system.”

“Dialled out?” The General removed his pass-card from his pocket and displayed it as they passed a checkpoint, approaching a large, steel door at the end of the corridor.

The Colonel smiled grimly, returning the salute of a soldier that opened the steel door for the approaching group. “That’s not the most interesting bit,” he said.

The group stepped out into a large room, two stories high, with several gun emplacements set around the perimeter. One side of the room, several large windows showed a control room on the ground floor, with a series of computer banks and work stations being controlled by several Camp Black personnel. At the centre of the room was the object.

Holloway had only seen it in brief pictures up until now, and was caught momentarily by the elegance of the device. It stood almost a floor high, ornately carved with symbols around the edges and interrupted regularly with red arrow-marks. Several technicians still flocked around it, taking notes and examining several aspects of the object. Soldiers trained their weapons on the iris of the circle, making the General wonder what had happened once the object had been activated.

The Colonel smiled, allowing the superior officer a moment to digest the visual beauty of the object before nodding to a door on the left. “I have a specialist briefed to give you the full situation.”

Holloway nodded with his eyes still on the device. The group then turned and entered the next room, passing through the control centre and alighting a flight of stairs to a large room on the second floor. A large table adorned the centre of the room with six chairs. Ram dismissed his entourage, and Holloway nodded to his own troops to leave before the two men took their seats and waited.

Presently, a white-coated man stepped into the room from a side door. Tall, blonde and young to be wearing the Captain’s pips on his jacket, he saluted both officers with a free hand; the other was carrying a large file of paper.

The Colonel nodded. “At ease, Captain.” He turned to Holloway. “This is Captain Lawrence Broderick, our chief researcher and the designated head of the Project Iris program.”

Holloway looked at the Captain. “Project Iris?” he enquired.

Broderick smiled. “It seemed appropriate after we witnessed its activation.” Dimming the lights, the Captain switched on an overhead monitor and began displaying pictures. “Gentlemen, to put it bluntly, Project Iris appears to be a portal of some kind.”

Holloway raised his eyebrows in a disbelieving fashion. Broderick continued unabated. “Once the device was transported and emplaced within Camp Black, we proceeded to do a metallurgical analysis and numerous carbon-dating tests to establish the composition and age of the device.” He hesitated. “The metallurgy tests are still being examined, as the first results could not identify the material as anything we had seen before.”

Changing the document on the projector, he continued. “The carbon-dating has established that the Iris is over four century’s old-”

“Excuse me?” Holloway leant forward despite himself. “Four centuries?”

Broderick nodded. Holloway looked at Colonel Ram. “I thought you said this thing had a computer system of some sort.”

Ram looked sombre. “It does.”

Broderick hesitated. “General, please, all will become clear.”

Holloway sat back, his mind racing at the prospect of the find. Broderick continued. “We established that the Iris required a power source to activate; with the permission of the Joint Chiefs, the Project Iris team developed a method of powering the Iris. However, our early tests we ineffective and it was only when we re-routed the output of an entire power station did we manage to gain any reaction.” Broderick licked his lips. “What happened next was astounding.”

The projector changed once more, this time to a video clip. The view displayed was from a security camera in the corner of the Iris room. Several technicians were working around the power cables snaking from the back of the device, and everything seemed calm.

All of a sudden, the device began humming. The chevrons around the edge of the device grew in illumination to a bright red. Several cheers were heard from the assembled technicians, along with a few visual salutations and handshakes. Holloway watched with a careful eye, and then blinked in astonishment.

The Iris began moving. The inner circumference of the circle began rotating, the symbols spinning round hypnotically. Shouts of alarm from the technicians were drowned by the rumbling of the mechanisms as the group fell back in surprise from the object. The rotating element stopped momentarily, and a single chevron moved, locking itself down over a particular symbol. The device then began moving again, repeating the procedure with all seven chevrons, and a tidal wave of energy blasted outwards from the centre of the Iris, before fading back into a shimmering, water-like layer across the entire circumference.

Holloway watched aghast. He stood, walking across to the video clip, now paused on the image of the activated Iris, and looked at it closely. He turned to Broderick, his face lit by the lenses of the projector. “What is it?” he asked quietly.

Broderick hesitated. “Our initial analysis suggests that it’s a gateway, Sir,” he explained. “A…Star-Gate, if you will, between our planet and another.”

Holloway rubbed his head, feeling overwhelmed. “Another planet?” he asked wearily, not quite believing what he was hearing.

Colonel Ram interjected. “An analysis of the portal discovered that the energy link the Iris creates can transmit radio and video signals in real-time, so we sent a remote device through the Iris. The video footage we got back was of a deserted plain, no sign of life.”

Holloway raised his hand from his face, looking at Ram. “How can you be sure it wasn’t just somewhere else on the planet,” he asked, half-realizing that he was accepting the concept of a portal of any kind, let alone interplanetary.

Ram looked at Broderick, and the two men shared a quiet glance for a second. Then Broderick smiled. “The grass was blue, General.”

Holloway let his mouth hang loose for a moment, before clamping it shut with military dignity. He turned to look at the paused video clip once more, to gaze upon the Iris and all that it meant.

“My God,” he breathed.