Chapter Text
Walter was on his way to General O’Neill’s office, musing about the last few weeks and how the General had seemingly settled in after the situation with the Goa’uld and the associated paperwork, which had been considerable and after the matter of Mr. Gilmore, the administrative aide General Hammond had assigned three weeks before the handover with the best of intentions and a filing system that Walter was still quietly correcting.
The General had handled both with the particular brand of composure that Walter had come to recognise as his default mode — outwardly untroubled, inwardly doing rapid calculations, asking the right questions just late enough that you thought he hadn’t noticed.
He had the damp memo under his arm and a considered view on how to present it, when he turned the corner to the General’s office and stopped in the doorway.
The General was still on his first cup of coffee. The machine on Level 28 had done something new and dispiriting that morning, but Walter had chosen not to examine it further nor inform the General about it. Silvester would fix it quickly. Probably.
The General looked up and Walter silently handed over the memo.
***
Jack took the paper between two fingers and doubiously looked at it. Then back at Walter.
He sighed. „Why is this memo wet.”
“There was some concern about using the printer on sublevel 11, sir.”
Jack looked at the memo again. The paper had started to wrinkle at the edges in the way that paper did when it had gotten wet and then someone had tried to save it by leaving it somewhere to dry and then decided, ultimately, that the content was more urgent than the presentation.
“Walter.”
“Sir.”
“Is there a reason the printer on sublevel 11 was a concern.”
“Yes, sir.”
A lesser man would have left it there, on the grounds that Walter would eventually continue. Jack O’Neill had been a General for two months and was still learning that being a General meant that people waited for you to ask the follow-up question. As opposed to being in the field, where people told you things continuously and with great urgency and occasionally while someone was shooting at them.
He read the memo.
He put it down.
He picked up his coffee.
“Sergeant,” he said, “when you say pipe repair, are we talking about a thing that was already happening, or a thing that caused the—”
“The repair was the cause, sir, yes.”
“How.”
Walter’s expression shifted approximately one millimeter in the direction of something that was not quite sympathy. “The work order was submitted by Engineering, authorized by Maintenance Oversight, scheduled by Facilities Coordination, and executed by a contractor cleared for sublevel access under a standing agreement from 2001 that has not been reviewed since.”
Jack let this settle.
“So who authorized it.”
“Engineering submitted it.”
“Right, so Engineering—”
“Engineering submitted the initial request. Maintenance Oversight approved it.”
“Okay, so Maintenance—”
“Maintenance Oversight approved it on the recommendation of Facilities Coordination.”
Jack put his coffee down very slowly. “And Facilities Coordination—”
“Referred to the 2001 standing agreement, sir.”
There was a silence.
“The 2001 standing agreement,” Jack said, “that hasn’t been reviewed since 2001.”
“That’s correct.”
“Which was authorized by—”
“That would require pulling records from before the current filing system, sir. It may take some time.”
Jack looked at the memo again. He thought about the chain of authorization he had just attempted to follow, which had the structural integrity of wet paper, which was appropriate given the circumstances. He thought about the geology lab on sublevel 11, which according to the memo had received approximately two inches of standing water across its entire floor, destroying three weeks of sorted and catalogued soil samples from three separate off-world sites.
He thought about the fact that it was Monday. Seven forty-three in the morning. He hadn’t finished his coffee.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go look at it.”
****
Siler was already there.
This was not a surprise — Siler was always already there, wherever there happened to be, in the same way that certain facts of life were simply present when you arrived and showed no signs of having just gotten there. What was a surprise was the waders.
They were the kind you wore for fishing. Orange. They came up to Siler’s chest.
Jack stood in the doorway of the geology lab and looked at the water, which had receded to about an inch, and at Siler, who was moving through it with the purposeful calm of a man performing a task that was unusual but not, for him, apparently, unprecedented, and at the shelving units along the far wall, which bore the waterlogged remains of what had previously been an organized sample collection.
“Siler.”
“Sir.”
“Where did you get those.”
Siler looked down at the waders with a brief expression of what might, on another face, have been mild surprise at the question. “I have them, sir.”
Jack considered this. “Of course you do.” He looked around the lab. The floor was concrete, sloped very slightly, and the water was still moving in a thin sheet toward a drain in the far corner that was not entirely keeping up. The smell was of cold stone and something that had been wet for longer than it should have been. “How long is this going to take.”
“The water, or the damage assessment, sir?”
“Either. Both.”
“Water should be clear by end of day. Damage assessment—” Siler paused, which for Siler constituted a significant emotional beat, “—depends on what Dr. Jackson says about the samples, sir.”
****
Daniel said quite a lot about the samples.
He said it in Jack’s office, sitting in the chair across the desk with his jacket sleeves still rolled up from whatever he’d been doing before, and he said it with the specific quality of upset that archaeologists and scientists had, which was a grief that was also partly professional and therefore had a certain kind of controlled vocabulary even when the content was fairly bleak.
“Three weeks,” Daniel said. “P3X-888, the two sites from the MALP survey on—actually, which ones specifically, I need to check against the catalogue if there’s anything left of the—”
“Daniel.”
“Right. Three weeks. Most of it’s unsalvageable. The sediment sample containers were sealed, so those might be okay, but the organic material—” He stopped. Pushed his glasses up. “The soil samples from P3X-888 are probably the biggest loss. Those took two days to collect and sort on site.”
Jack nodded. He felt the appropriate amount of bad about this, which was not a small amount. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel looked at him for a moment, and something shifted. “I mean, it could’ve been worse.” He paused. “The interesting samples are fine.”
Jack waited. “Which samples are those.”
“The ones from your office.”
Beat.
“The ones from—” Jack looked at his desk. His shelving unit. The small row of labelled containers that he had assumed were decorative, or perhaps a passive-aggressive gesture, or possibly both. “Daniel, when did you—”
“They’ve been there for about four weeks.” Daniel’s expression was entirely sincere. “I needed somewhere climate-stable. Your office is surprisingly well-regulated, temperature-wise.”
“Those are my shelves.”
“And the samples are very grateful.” He stood up, rolling his sleeves back down. “I’ll let you know about the catalogue once I’ve been down to assess.”
He was at the door before Jack found the appropriate response, which was nothing, because Daniel had already gone, and also because Jack had just realized he didn’t actually know what was on his own shelves, which was a different and more personal problem that he was going to have to think about later.
He picked up his coffee.
It was cold.
He drank it anyway. Mondays weren’t really about the coffee being good. They were about the coffee being there.