Fandomweekly Challenge 51 - Earning the right

[m_findlow]

Title: Earning the right
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 51 - Audition at fandomweekly
Summary: Sam knows that hearts and minds are harder to earn than stripes and stars.

'Captain Samantha Carter,' she repeated, showing him her security badge. 'I'm due in a meeting with General Hammond at 0800, Sergeant.' She didn't like to emphasise their differences in rank but she was going to be late at this rate as they checked her credentials for the third time since she'd passed through first checkpoint, some five miles outside the Cheyenne Mountain complex, and again just five hundred yards from the vast corrugated iron tunnel that lead deep inside the mountain.

She had the schematic for the base memorised. The facility had been part of the Air Force's assets for seventy years but defunct and in hibernation for the last thirty. Only in the past few years had it been repurposed for the specific use as a research base for the Stargate Program. She'd been involved in its technical layout and specifications insofar as they needed to be for operational needs, including refitting the power grid, construction of the mechanical roof that would allow the Stargate to be winched in from an Mi-26 Halo hovering over the top of the mountain, new designs for lockdown facilities and failsafes, and all of the design for research labs and other equipment needed to continue their study of the gate. And all of that was in between her own research on the gate and dealing with the politics from the generals in Washington who viewed the program as still pie in the sky stuff not worth the Air Force's resources.

She persisted however, using whatever nouse she could. Being a woman hadn't helped her cause and she wasn't yet old enough to have colleagues in the upper echelons she could lean on who had served with her and remembered their time posted in Iraq. Though she disliked doing so, she'd used her father's influence. The higher ups at the Pentagon knew Jacob Carter from their Cold War days and had a modicum of respect for the general on the cusp of his retirement. They afforded a slight bending of the ear to the daughter of a decorated general.

She faced their awkward questions about how her father was with bland and nondescript answers. The fact that he was disappointed she hadn't made progress into the space program grated on his pride. NASA's active space exploration had died with the astronauts aboard the Challenger and so ended Sam's hopes of a move sideways, but the Stargate Program promised to change all that, even her father didn't fully understand what she did. If he'd known, perhaps they wouldn't have ended up so estranged.

All her hard work and effort had paid off in some ways, but not quite as she'd hoped. Getting the Stargate working should have been the pinnacle of her career and put her right in line to be on the expedition team, but General West had firmly rejected her application, despite her excessive qualifications. The expedition team was not a scientific project, he'd reiterated. No one knew what would be on the other side, if there even was another side. They'd taken the traditional military position, option for seasoned men to serve their country as they stepped though into the unknown.

Not this time, however. The program had been shut down for over a year after the confrontation on Abydos, eliminating the risk of any Goa'uld invasion, but now things had changed. With their Stargate activated from the other side and forces coming through, killing them men that had been stationed to watch over it, the threat of a repeat was both real and imminent.

O'Neills team had destroyed the Abydos gate which meant that these incursionary forces must have come from somewhere else. It was all part of her working hypothesis that the number of symbols on the gate represented an almost infinite number of worlds, or addresses as she liked to call them. Locations in space dictated by the intersection of constellations, proven by Doctor Jackson, yet they'd never been able to get any other combination to lock on. However, just because they couldn't get it working didn't mean those on the other side had the same problem. With Doctor Jackson gone, she was the foremost expert on the gate and how it worked.

And now as she'd been briefed on the way over that Colonel O'Neills report omitted the fact that the Abydos gate had not been destroyed, that meant there was still one world their gate could travel to. Someone needed to go there and study the gate at the other end to understand why it worked and theirs didn't. This time her request had been overwhelmingly supported, although her briefing at the Pentagon had included undertones that she was being sent there to figure out how to shut it down from their side. Good fortune or happy coincidence that the man now in charge of the program running out of the Cheyenne Mountain complex had severed with her father had only consolidated her position.

Her heels clicked down the concrete halls and just beyond the door to the boardroom, where an MP stood guarding it against unwanted guests, she could already hear their voices filtering out. She heard her name mentioned.

'I'd prefer to put together my own team, sir.'

'Not on this mission, sorry. Carter's our expert on the Stargate.' She'd never met this general Hammond but she liked him already.

'Where's he transferring from?'

Sam resisted the urge to roll her eyes as the MP nodded at her security pass, letting her through. And... scene, she thought, stepping inside. 'She is transferring from the Pentagon.'

Seeing the room full of men, she knew she'd have her work cut out for her. She was officially on the team but she wasn't yet part of the team. The Gulf War had taught her everything she needed to know about how to deal with situations like these. Her PhD had gotten her in but it was her military rank that would keep her here and she'd earned both.