SG1-25 Hostile Ground(108)

“Sir?” He turned to find Colonel Dixon standing at his side.

“Colonel?” Dixon’s Pentagon Strike Team had been parachuted in to oversee the evacuation, so he was surprised to see the colonel still in the gate room. “I thought your team had gone through with the President.”

Dixon nodded. “Yes sir, they did.” He looked uncomfortable. “Sir, requesting permission to stay Earth-side.”

Hammond didn’t know him well, they’d crossed paths only once before, but he knew Dixon was a good man and this request was unexpected. “Why, Colonel? They need you out there on the Alpha Site.”

Rubbing a hand across his face Dixon said, “Lainie, my wife — She’s expecting our first child in a couple months, sir.”

Hammond closed his eyes for a moment, as if that could block out this one small tragedy among so many billions of tragedies. “And you want to be with her,” he said and didn’t add at the end.

But Dixon shook his head. “No sir, she was in DC when the assault began.” His face went tight and hard; they both knew that Washington must have gone already. “I want to fight, sir. I don’t want to run from the bastards.” He jerked his head up toward the skies above the mountain. “There are good men and women dying up there, sir. I want to join them.”

It was a sentiment Hammond fully understood, but sometimes dying was the easy option. He considered Dixon for a long moment, tried to take the measure of the man in the few moments they had together. What did he know about him? He’d served under Frank Cromwell and had led the Pentagon Strike Team since Cromwell’s death here at the SGC. Dixon had an honest face, but it was full of banked rage and grief and he was burning to fight back. He might just be the man Hammond needed to put his plan — worthy of O’Neill in its reckless optimism — into action. “You really want to fight, Colonel?”

“Absolutely, I do, sir.”

“You know we can’t win.”

“We can die trying.”

Hammond nodded, folded his arms and issued the challenge. “What if I said there was something else you could do? It won’t turn the tide — nothing can do that now — but it could save lives. A lot of lives.”

“I don’t want to run,” Dixon reiterated. “Lainie deserves more than that.”

“It means staying on Earth,” Hammond said. “I’m talking about resistance, son.”

He shifted his feet. “How? Doing what?”

“It’s a crazy plan,” Hammond warned. “In all likelihood it won’t succeed and you won’t survive.”

Dixon gave a bleak laugh. “It’s the end of the world, sir. What have I got to lose?”

That made Hammond smile, made him think that maybe his last stratagem might pay off. “There’s a C-5 at Peterson,” he said. “It’s fully crewed and waiting for orders — assuming the base is still standing, of course.” That was the first roll of the dice. “You’ll have to get out of the mountain first and over to Peterson. When you find that bird, I want you to take her to Groom Lake.”

“Area 51, sir?”

Hammond nodded. “Retrieve the Beta gate and its DHD and take them as far away from here as possible. Find somewhere remote — perhaps with one of our overseas allies. Somewhere secret, somewhere no one who’s compromised by the Goa’uld would know about. Get the gate working, keep it working for as long as you can, and send as many people as possible through to the Alpha Site.” He gestured to the forlorn procession of evacuees. “These shouldn’t be the only people with a chance, Colonel. Humanity needs more than them if it’s to survive.”

Dixon’s face had blanched, but he was a good, solid man and he was up for the fight. Hammond might just have laid the salvation of humanity on his shoulders, but he wasn’t going to buckle under the strain. “I’ll make it work, sir. We’ll resist these bastards all the way.”

Hammond nodded. “Yes we will, son.”

“What about you, sir?” Dixon said. “Won’t you come too?”

“No,” he said. “My place is here until the end.”

Dixon took a breath and nodded. “Understood, sir.” Drawing himself up, he offered a sharp salute. “Good luck, General.”

Hammond returned the salute. “Godspeed, Colonel.”

And with that, Dixon turned and started weaving his way through the orderly chaos of the gate room, breaking into a run as he left through the blast doors and disappeared into the emptying base. The dice were rolling now and Hammond knew he’d never find out how they landed, but he had faith in his people — in Dave Dixon and the crew of the C-5, in humanity as a whole. They might be down, but they weren’t out yet. And if Dixon could offer mankind a chance, a way of enduring and fighting back, then maybe these would not be humanity’s final days on Earth. At the very least, Dixon could offer them hope and sometimes hope was the most powerful weapon of all.