drabble: Loyaulte Me Lie
pansychubb: I'd like something from Jeannie Miller's POV during Art is Long, please.
note: This takes place in the Qui Habitat 'verse. I tried to avoid spoiling Art Is Long, but I do -- albeit not in a way that diminishes Rodney's tale (I hope). However, caveat lector on that front.
Qui Habitat: overview | homepage | LJ tag
5700 words
Loyaulte Me Lie
Meeting Kaleb is the best thing that has ever happened to her, Jeannie will tell anyone who asks. It's not just the usual bit about finding your soulmate and your best friend and the fact that the two of them together created Madison. These are all wonderful things, things she is grateful for every moment of the day. But the greatest gift Kaleb has ever given her has been the courage to be brave, because from that, all else follows.
Going to graduate school was... automatic. It wasn't a decision she really considered because it wasn't hers to make. It had been made for her by the outrageous success of her brother and the expectations of her parents to meet his lofty achievements. Mer had his scholarships and his prizes and his inhuman publication schedule and had universities offering up sweet teaching deals like he was an athletic prodigy instead of a chubby physics geek. All of this while Jeannie was finishing up undergrad, so the business of getting in to grad school (application costs funded by their parents) was complicated by having to set odds on the likelihood of Mer ending up as her professor.
(She settled on UBC because it was the best program in Canada and Mer was pretty much set on going down to the States.)
Grad school, the part where you are actually in classes and doing academic work, is very easy if you're bright. It's like undergrad, except fewer floaters and you never have to sit through classes for requirements that have nothing to do with your major. The professors are more vested, the classes are smaller, and if there's more homework, you don't care because it's all related and relevant and important.
Except it really isn't if you manage to pull your head out of your textbook for a second. And Jeannie always seemed to have one eye on the world outside. She was always aware of the pissiness of academic politics, the backstabbing, the ass-kissing, the way pedagogy was the absolute bottom priority as far as anyone was concerned (something she'd been aware of ever since Mer had been crowing that Purdue was offering him a one-class-every-three-semesters teaching rotation and god, wouldn't it be great to never have to deal with students?), the fact that grad school parties sucked because nobody had anything to talk about except school.
When Trevor Linden got traded back to the Canucks, Vancouver went bananas... except in her little corner of the universe, where Doctor Rosmanov asked why there were whale-with-a-C and red-yellow-black flags on the streets and nobody in the entire lab (except for her) could answer. Rinse and repeat for provincial elections and the Rolling Stones playing at GM Place and anything else short of the American invasion of Iraq.
She met Kaleb in an organic market in Kits; they didn't meet cute -- she blew him off twice because she was stuck writing an article (on her advisor's pet project, which had nothing to do with her research) -- and then he had a conference in Norman, Oklahoma. But once they finally had a date, it was smooth sailing from there.
He was the first person to ask her why she was in grad school if it made her so unhappy. He was the first person she told that she had no idea what else to do with her life and was terrified of letting everyone down. Which at that point was just Mer, since their parents had done their tag-team cancer routine and passed within months of each other far too young.
Madison was... not precisely an accident. Jeannie distinctly remembers thinking that this was maybe the wrong time in her cycle to have skipped the condom... and then that she was actually okay with whatever happened. And whatever did happen, pretty much from the moment she peed on a stick and it turned blue. Kaleb proposed, Jeannie put in for a leave from school (her advisor was annoyed that he was losing the unpaid labor), she told Mer... who flipped. He flew up to Vancouver to try to talk her out of her decision -- whether that decision was to have the baby, marry Kaleb, or (temporarily, at the time) quit grad school, he was manifestly unclear -- and ended up flying out of her life after they both said things that should never be said to the only family you have left.
Jeannie changed her name upon marrying (which she'd thought she'd never do) in part because she wanted her new life to be as unlike the old one as possible. Jean Miller (wife, mother-to-be, amateur gardener) was born four months before Madison Elaine graced the world with her presence. It was awesome.
Jeannie is at Science World with Madison (and the rest of the school-age population, since it's a day off) when everyone starts buzzing about Beijing getting bombed. They are sitting outside with ice cream cones as the news moves through the crowds. This being Vancouver, everyone assumes it's the Americans doing the bombing. They end up hurrying home, but only because Maddie got chocolate ice cream all over herself and she's at the age where she will be Very, Very Upset if she can't ever wear her purple dress again because it's stained.
CBC News is still on by the time Kaleb gets home from work. The Americans have been holding press conferences left and right -- the President from the Oval Office, various generals from the Pentagon -- saying that it wasn't them. The Chinese aren't making any official statements, but the Russians seem inclined to accept the Americans' story.
"Who the hell is left?" Kaleb asks as he fills the kettle and turns it on. "It wasn't us."
The next morning, Jeannie's back from dropping Maddie off at school and about to start working (she's a freelance editor for a textbook company; the pay is good, the work boring, the hours perfect) when Kaleb calls. "Turn on the TV," he tells her. "Now it's Dhaka."
She turns the TV back on for long enough to see satellite imagery of the crater where the capital of Bangladesh used to be before she's out the door again to bring Madison back home. She doesn't know what's going on and neither does anyone else. The streets are crowded and tense, not quite panicked and yet she knows it's just a big car wreck away from breaking apart. It feels like a big disaster movie, except it's not all going to be over in two hours.
They're all back home by lunch. Maddie is not unaware of the mood shift around her, but she's easily distracted by Kaleb asking her to read him a story. Jeannie's in the kitchen plotting out a meal that won't involve heading to the market when the doorbell rings.
"Jean Miller?" an American military officer, one of two, asks. "Can we come in?"
Kaleb sends Maddie upstairs to play and joins her as the two Air Force officers... speak nonsense.
"Aliens," Jeannie repeats flatly after they finish their initial spiel. "We're being attacked by aliens. And you want me to help you fight them."
Kaleb is looking over Major Belgrave's shoulder, probably trying to figure out if he can get to the phone to dial for help without being overcome by the two men.
"We understand that this sounds... farfetched," Captain Bascom agrees. "But it will sound a little less so after the President makes his speech at the UN at 3 o'clock."
"No it won't," Belgrave retorts. "But it won't be two crazy Air Force officers telling it to you."
It's 2:45 and she's weirded out enough that she doesn't call the police and instead just makes tea for the four of them and they wait.
It's six on the East Coast and the President looks far more worn today than yesterday. He is joined on the podium by the Chinese and Russian ambassadors, but he's the only one talking. They've known about extraterrestrial life for more than a decade, he says -- first the Americans, then the Russians, then the Chinese, then a few select other nations. They've been fighting to keep the planet safe since then, to mostly acceptable results, but now they are facing a new enemy that is greater in number and technology than anything the 'Stargate Program' can bring to bear. Earth is the last major battleground for the Ori to conquer the galaxy and success is not guaranteed.
There is more -- to the speech, from the newscasters -- but Jeannie turns back to the men sitting in her kitchen. "Why me?"
Belgrave shrugs. "Because back when we were organizing our resources in preparation for this battle, someone put your name on a list of people we'd need."
She looks at Kaleb, who looks as confused as she feels. She's been nothing but a housewife and part-time editor for the last few years; her advisor -- who most certainly was not secretly working for this Stargate Program -- hadn't thought enough of her to ask when she was coming back from maternity leave, so he didn't volunteer her. "Who would do that?"
"Do you know a Doctor Rodney McKay?"
In the end, Jeannie accepts the offer because there's absolutely no alternative. Not that the Air Force would kidnap her in her sleep if she refused -- although with the revelations that have come out in the weeks since Beijing and Dhaka, she'd be markedly less surprised if they had -- but because she cannot imagine saying "no, I don't want to go try to save the world."
(In her heart of hearts, she can admit that it doesn't hurt that out of all of the people in all of the world, Mer -- Rodney -- thinks she's qualified. She's out of the game as far as academe goes, but that doesn't mean she doesn't still read the journals and keep up with the intellectual aspects. She knows her brother is a big shot, that his articles are treasured as much for their subject matter as for their relative rarity, that he's a lion on the veldt of astrophysics and his regard matters for more reasons than fraternal.)
On her first day in Colorado Springs, she is brought to 'the Mountain' and to an orientation session that is almost hilarious for its brevity in relation to the importance of their tasks. She introduces herself as "Mrs. Jean Miller", but nobody remembers (or cares) that she's still technically ABD and she's Doctor Miller to everyone by the end of the week. She stops caring because if this work isn't worth a doctorate, nobody's is.
She is assigned to a working group headed up by Arkady Kalprovsky, a brilliant (if paranoid and cranky) physicist, and their job is to create high-energy power sources. They have two days to learn everything about ZPMs before they're expected to start being productive.
Reading journals and going through problems in old textbooks is one thing; being part of the living, breathing organism of cutting-edge science is another. She doesn't sleep for two days because she's got that much more to catch up on than just wormholes and subspace particles.
They work almost nonstop; they sleep in shifts, they live on coffee, they set alarms to remind them of what day it is. It's supposed to be three weeks on, three days off, but almost everyone blows through their scheduled down-time without realizing that it's come and gone.
Jeannie doesn't. She books tickets back to Vancouver (ever more expensive with oil over $200/barrel and rising daily) and trades shifts and even buys Barr's furlough off of him to get extra time at home. Occasionally, they come down to Colorado Springs -- her SGC affiliation opens all sorts of doors, or at least gets them on to fully booked flights. Maddie and Kaleb are managing -- to the point that she wonders, at her most fatigued, if they even notice her absence -- but there's no pretending that anything is normal.
Jerusalem is obliterated during one of her visits home. Every church bell in Vancouver rings out in grief.
Life in any major city is now full of evacuation drills, emergency response tests, rationing of supplies to prevent hording, fear. It's like everywhere there's more than half a million people is now London during the Blitz. Nobody really thinks Vancouver is a target -- it's not the biggest city in Canada, it's not the biggest city on the Pacific Coast, it has no religious significance -- but it doesn't matter. Kaleb is part of the civilian safety patrol and Maddie has memorized where she has to go if the sirens sound when she's at school (and at home and a half-dozen other places). Jeannie has to show proof of area residency to go to the Shopper's Drug Mart around the corner.
"I want my world back," she tells Kaleb in the dark.
Life at the Mountain, by comparison, is oddly normal. For values of normal that were the reason she left academia in the first place. It's like the UBC physics department writ large -- no real concept of what is going on outside its doors and no real interest in finding out. Everyone is living solely for their work, forgetting in the process that those who aren't still have lives that matter, lives with meaning. Everyone here wants to save the world... but they have no idea what that is, it sometimes seems.
Kalprovsky mutters one day about her having a job here when this all blows over, but she knows that there's no way in hell she stays.
Mer's arrival at the Mountain is preceded by a couple of weeks of rumors and bitching. Nobody knows that she's Rodney McKay's sister and, judging by the way everyone talks about him, that's probably a ruse worth keeping up until she can't. Rodney McKay is an arrogant, insensitive, brilliant taskmaster and people can't seem to decide whether his arrival is going to be exactly what they need or the reason half of the science unit defects to the Ori.
She's mid-level staff now, here long enough and doing good enough work to be charged with the supervising of newer arrivals. Mer finds her doing what she'd pretty much sworn to never do -- conflate pedagogy with public shaming.
"Hey, Mer," she says, like they haven't spent most of the last decade being politely civil from a very long distance (two galaxies!) away.
In fact, the last decade almost doesn't matter, at least as far as their relationship goes. Most of the bases of their disagreements are moot -- she's back working in physics and he's accepted that she isn't divorcing Kaleb and returning Madison to the stork. With very little in the way of professional secrets -- he's sort of her boss's boss's boss -- almost everything he has to say is relevant and useful and Mer, for all of his well-deserved reputation for not suffering fools, is a brilliant teacher when he wants to be.
He's also there to re-arrange and re-assign and re-prioritize and, once it gets out that he's her brother, her social life (such as it is) takes an interesting twist.
But, in the end, there aren't mass defections to the Ori, Mer doesn't fire or humiliate nearly as many people as expected (there's a pool for how many people he makes cry; Jeannie almost wins it -- would have won it if Carrie Penner had just managed to keep a stiff upper lip), and he spends a week with Aeronautical Engineering's air defense subgroup doing something with their shield projections that has them all giddy with excitement. It's almost anticlimactic, except that in this warped, chaotic environment, when she has lost so much of everything, she finally has a brother again.
Early on, she told him about her discomfort with the disassociation here, the way it's too easy to see this as the research opportunity of a lifetime and forget that there are billions of people waiting to be saved. The blindness at the Mountain is two-fold -- they have the best 'view' of the other worlds and they are still living on this one and none of it seems to register. She thinks he understands, even if she's not sure he agrees. At least until she hears about him dragging the theoretical astrophysics group over to the stargate to watch the bloodied team operators stumble home.
The SG teams aren't the only ones losing people; there are entire project groups that are based off-world and, occasionally, one of them gets attacked. They lose so many people when P3X-367 is bombed that the research is set back months and there's nobody left to do anything but rebuild from scratch.
In her lab, among her people, Jeannie institutes a daily moment of silence -- 1100 usually, but it's flexible - where they stop what they're doing and think about everyone they've lost, everyone they've left behind, everyone back upstairs and outside who is counting on them to make this work. For herself, there is a whiteboard that she goes to every day and adds a name -- someone she knows. The first names are Kaleb's and Madison's, but after that it's her friends and neighbors and old roommates and even Mrs. Gordon, her second-grade teacher. The day she sees names appearing in handwriting not her own, she cries.
Her turn to be based off-world comes soon enough; she'd be almost okay with it -- she's been through a wormhole and she's been to P89-584 before and it's sort of like what Florida was before the Spanish landed -- but it wipes out her trip home. Kaleb and Maddie haven't been down in so long and Maddie cries on the phone to her, begging her to come home. She instead goes to Mer, hoping that he can do something.
He can't. He won't, actually, since she's learned that there's actually very little Mer can't make happen at the SGC. He's not a bastard about it, he's completely earnest in his assurances that she won't be gone a day longer than scheduled, and he even offers to get her ticket home re-done. She still ends up going back to her lab and sobbing.
Mer is there to wish her well when her team is stacked up at the stargate ready to depart. He gives her a hug, a Coffee Crisp, and a printed out confirmation that her flight to Vancouver has been rescheduled for the day after she returns. "Be brilliant," he tells her and she knows what he really means.
"I love you, too," she says, giving him a kiss on the cheek.
It's the last time she sees him, although she will not find out for weeks that he's been sent back to Atlantis.
They're off-world a week when the Ori armies land on Earth, attacking New York and somewhere in China. The attacks are repelled, but it's a cold comfort -- they all know that the ground forces are only showing up now because the Ori are sure it will be worth the effort. Jeannie is so scared for her family that she can't even do simple addition, let alone high-level physics. A message comes from the SGC two days later informing them that their families are being collected and will be waiting at the SGC for their return.
"They don't want us sneaking home to get them," Martin explains.
Once they return from space, it's a very emotional reunion for all of them. Maddie is hysterical and Jeannie can't stop herself crying long enough to soothe her.
The three of them live in her small studio quarters; it's not permanent, they're told. Teams will be relocated around the country and off-world as needed to keep the concentration in Colorado Springs from being too high. It's only a matter of time before the Ori bomb the place to hell -- the stargate is here, NORAD, Fort Carson, all of the Air Force bases -- and it's almost ironic that her family was brought here to be protected.
Maddie, thankfully, seems to be taking it in stride after her initial meltdown. She knows that they can't go home, even if she sometimes chooses not to remember, and her time is well-filled by activities and attempts at education -- they aren't going to send the kids to locals schools until they know who is staying and who is going. She still asks questions that her parents can't answer, though, like why can't her friend Maureen and her family come here, too, if this is where it's safe.
Kaleb has a harder time of it, Jeannie thinks, but he doesn't say much about it. They get brochures from Peterson's family assistance groups about being a military spouse and she thinks those help a little. He has no productive way to spend his time, is still Maddie's primary caregiver because Jeannie still works crazy hours, and the helplessness and uselessness (his words) bother him. They fight sometimes, but not a lot because Maddie's too old to not pick up on it.
A month in, they are told that they are moving to outside San Jose. Things are better there -- they have a small apartment (above ground, which is a not insignificant matter) and Maddie has a school and Kaleb has plenty to do while he's getting them set up in the apartment and in the neighborhood.
"You were Missus Mom back in Vancouver," he tells her. "I can be Mister Mom down here."
If it were as simple as that, it would have been bliss. But the world outside their apartment door is fracturing and shards cannot help but penetrate into their home. The Ori are here on Earth, taking over large swaths of the Third World -- they've pretty much annexed Africa -- and still desecrating any religiously significant location or artifact that they can find. Mecca and Jerusalem are abattoirs, the holy sites filling up with believers who will become martyrs, a cycle that has no end. The Ori went to Missouri, for pity's sake, to make sure the Mormons didn't think they would be faring any better.
The SGC is losing personnel, both military and civilian, at a dreadful pace. Jeannie can name a dozen people she'd at least shared a meal with who are now dead.
The Ori are learning about Earth telecommunications, too. They hijack television and radio channels and broadcast their messages direct to the people. They plead for understanding, for acceptance, for peace. They promise respite and prosperity and an end to suffering. They make it sound tempting and reasonable and make the SGC's attempt to drive them off as irrational and an act of war against their own planet.
"All we want is for you to see the wisdom of the Ori," one prior says. "We are not interested in punishing you. We will gladly welcome you into the light."
They stop watching television. Between the Ori infomercials and the footage of battles lost and won, there's nothing they want to see anymore.
They make breakthroughs at work, but never fast enough. There are so many high-priority requests on their time that all she ever feels is failure for disappointing them. She sleeps both too much and not enough; she's always tired, always worn in ways that have nothing to do with how much sleep she's getting.
Last year, she was baking a cake for Maddie's birthday, going to three different stores to find a purple tablecloth and purple napkins. This year, Kaleb has to remind her what day it is.
They get notice that they have to leave San Jose; they're going off-world again. Maddie is despondent -- she has friends here, like she had in Vancouver, and not even the prospect of living on another planet can make tearing her away again anything less than what it is. Kaleb, too, is uneasy -- he's not eager to go back to the aimlessness of their time at the SGC.
"I can quit," she tells him. She's been thinking about it more and more, fantasizing about the three of them back home in Vancouver, riding out whatever may come like the rest of the world who doesn't have supergenius brothers with hiring powers.
"No you can't," Kaleb tells her. "I'd rather be bored and Maddie be despondent than bowing down to aliens and calling them gods. You don't want to, either."
PX9-757 has weather like Vancouver.
When the Ori come, it's like out of a movie. She's seen the soldiers on TV, seen photos at the SGC, but when they come for her, it's like nothing she's ever seen. She feels like it's happening to someone else, like there's another Jeannie Miller who is watching the airmen fight and die, overrun by such an overwhelming force as to be almost laughable -- they sent an army to take over an outpost with less than fifty people.
They don't threaten to kill her. They bundle her along with the rest of the scientists -- all of their families, thankfully, were evacuated three days ago -- and bring them on board one of their massive toilet-bowl ships. She is treated not unkindly, given food and a bed and a place to wash. She is also given a Book of Origin and told to read it. She does, since there's precious little else to do.
Origin is not, on its face, an awful religion. There's a lot that would pass for Earth religion -- respect for your fellow man, obedience, self-control. There's a lot of violence, too -- a lot of smiting the unbelievers -- but so the Bible and the Koran have their nasty bits, too.
"It's just that all we're seeing are the nasty bits," she explains when her handlers ask. "You're not showing us any light except for the glow of your energy-based weapons systems."
The reply is some metaphor about weeding and fertile gardens and crops, but she's lived in a city all of her life and the farming stuff goes right by her. She tells them that, too.
She has no idea how long she's held, but eventually, they're all dumped on a planet. They don't even know which one.
"Did we just flunk out of Ori School?" Morgenthau asks.
They dial Earth. The SGC is happy to see them, but just as befuddled. The debriefings are endless, just as boring as the Ori versions except the only thing she has to read here is an old copy of Outdoor Life.
Once that's done with, she gets a week off. They go to Vancouver. She hopes it will be an oasis, an island of calm, but it's not. It's good, but there is too much wrong with the world now for it to be any kind of balm.
The estimated total death count for Earth is in the hundreds of millions. They think it will be at a billion before next summer. It's a catastrophe on a scale she can't even comprehend -- was this what it was like to live through the Black Plague? When it's over, will the world be a wasteland?
She breaks down crying when Maddie asks her how many zeroes are in a billion.
No longer a security risk, she's put back to work. Kalprovsky's got new people and they both need instruction in how to deal with their crazy boss and guidance in the ways of existing projects because some of them have some really brilliant ideas. The group makes a huge leap in October, something strong enough to go to prototype and then to testing. It's not a ZPM, but it's something they can physically hand over to the operational side and it feels good.
The good feelings don't last, though. They never do anymore. They had to change the font of the list of dead SGC personnel again, shrinking it down so that it would fit in the space. There are so many.
They are rotated between locations every few weeks; she and Kaleb decide to keep Maddie on Earth every other off-world rotation so that she isn't endlessly being uprooted. The separation isn't as hard as it should be; the hours are so long that whether there's anyone waiting make very little difference. Maddie is either resigned or acclimated; Jeannie can't tell and if Kaleb can, he's reluctant to say.
"What happens if we leave?" Pagat asks one day. They've been staring at a whiteboard full of equations for hours, to the point that the numbers and variables have ceased being intelligible and are instead a blurry pattern, like a Celtic knot of ungraspable knowledge.
"Nothing happens," Morgenthau says. "They replace us with someone else and hope it doesn't set the project back too far."
Like they do when one of them dies, he doesn't say.
"You thinking of going somewhere?" Martin asks, curious-but-not-really.
"I'm very tired," is all Pagat says. "Did we drop an integral sign on that fifth line?"
They did and the discussion goes in other directions. But Jeannie thinks about it later, lying on the cot in the curtained-off area that is her private space. She is very tired, too, and walking away from it all is not something that's never crossed her mind before.
The war is going badly and while there is a certain amount of honor in fighting until the end (or until death, which is perhaps the more likely outcome), she's maybe at the point where she can't see the point. She came here because she wanted to help save the planet and, through that, keep her daughter safe. She stays because of that, too, but she isn't sure if she's doing anything to save Maddie right now. There's no place in this galaxy that's safe for her, at least not without accepting the Ori.
She's never seen a world already converted to Origin. She's seen footage of places on Earth that have -- Sub-Saharan nations that are suddenly verdant and peaceful -- but she's not sure if that's typical or not. She knows that there's no more fighting on the converted worlds, though, because the SGC does not commit to overthrowing the Ori and the Ori stop fighting once they get what they want.
Peace in defeat is still peace.
They rotate back to Earth again, just in time for a dismal spate where the SGC loses more than a dozen people in as many days. South America is starting to fall to the Ori; Australia is on its last legs in a fight that even the sublevels of the Mountain know is bloody and costly. There are science teams down there and SG operator teams helping out the local forces and nobody thinks any of them are coming home.
The next off-world rotation is the one Kaleb and Maddie are supposed to come on, but they get evacuated back to Earth a week in when the SGC gets word that an attack might be imminent. It isn't, but they keep the non-essential personnel back on Earth anyway. Jeannie celebrates her wedding anniversary alone with a Ring-Ding.
Back on Earth, there's a fuss when Jonas Quinn is brought back to the SGC, more dead than alive, after having been missing for months, something that should be a joyous occasion but isn't because they know he was tortured and would've died if he hadn't been found by accident. Jeannie, having been both looked for by the SGC and not tortured by the Ori, wonders if there's been a change of policy and, if so, by whom.
She never stops believing that the Ori are wrong for demanding conversion or death. But she maybe stops believing that the SGC is right for demanding that Earth die resisting.
Once she realizes that, once she accepts it, it feels like a weight has been lifted. She doesn't know why. It's not like she can act on her newfound insight, not like she can tell anyone -- not even Kaleb, whose commitment to the cause has been greater than her own for some time now, a turn of events she had never anticipated because Kaleb's causes have never been so large in scale or scope and she always liked that about him.
Nonetheless, she is aware that she's not alone, that others feel as she does.
There is new work to be done at the Antarctic base; the Asgard have coughed up something that they've been able to convert into a power supply for the weapons platform down there and suddenly there's a surge of human energy at the Mountain. With the chair operational, they'll be able to fight back against the Ori with the Ancients' own weapons. The chair's become something like a grail; the Ancients are sort of like the Ori's cousins and everyone thinks that that familial resemblance will mean that the weapons will be more effective.
"They're going to be spraying a garden hose at a hornet's nest," Sesniak says when that comes up during a long session of checking each other's work. "And we're the poor fucks having a picnic nearby."
It's all a moot point right now anyway -- they've just now figured out who (besides General O'Neill) can operate the chair and it'll be weeks (or months) before they're ready to use it as a weapon. But it's a conversation she comes back to because it's the first time she remembers hearing someone speak their disillusionment out loud.
She cannot save her daughter by building a better bomb or battery -- she cannot save anyone. All she's doing is helping to aim the hose at the hornets.
Kaleb gave her the courage to be brave, even when the most important people in her life wouldn't understand her choices. What happens afterward is not on impulse or in reaction to anything in particular. It's not done without regret, but it is done without remorse.
eta: Loyaulte Me Lie = "Loyalty Binds Me", the motto of Richard III
note: This takes place in the Qui Habitat 'verse. I tried to avoid spoiling Art Is Long, but I do -- albeit not in a way that diminishes Rodney's tale (I hope). However, caveat lector on that front.
Qui Habitat: overview | homepage | LJ tag
5700 words
Loyaulte Me Lie
Meeting Kaleb is the best thing that has ever happened to her, Jeannie will tell anyone who asks. It's not just the usual bit about finding your soulmate and your best friend and the fact that the two of them together created Madison. These are all wonderful things, things she is grateful for every moment of the day. But the greatest gift Kaleb has ever given her has been the courage to be brave, because from that, all else follows.
Going to graduate school was... automatic. It wasn't a decision she really considered because it wasn't hers to make. It had been made for her by the outrageous success of her brother and the expectations of her parents to meet his lofty achievements. Mer had his scholarships and his prizes and his inhuman publication schedule and had universities offering up sweet teaching deals like he was an athletic prodigy instead of a chubby physics geek. All of this while Jeannie was finishing up undergrad, so the business of getting in to grad school (application costs funded by their parents) was complicated by having to set odds on the likelihood of Mer ending up as her professor.
(She settled on UBC because it was the best program in Canada and Mer was pretty much set on going down to the States.)
Grad school, the part where you are actually in classes and doing academic work, is very easy if you're bright. It's like undergrad, except fewer floaters and you never have to sit through classes for requirements that have nothing to do with your major. The professors are more vested, the classes are smaller, and if there's more homework, you don't care because it's all related and relevant and important.
Except it really isn't if you manage to pull your head out of your textbook for a second. And Jeannie always seemed to have one eye on the world outside. She was always aware of the pissiness of academic politics, the backstabbing, the ass-kissing, the way pedagogy was the absolute bottom priority as far as anyone was concerned (something she'd been aware of ever since Mer had been crowing that Purdue was offering him a one-class-every-three-semesters teaching rotation and god, wouldn't it be great to never have to deal with students?), the fact that grad school parties sucked because nobody had anything to talk about except school.
When Trevor Linden got traded back to the Canucks, Vancouver went bananas... except in her little corner of the universe, where Doctor Rosmanov asked why there were whale-with-a-C and red-yellow-black flags on the streets and nobody in the entire lab (except for her) could answer. Rinse and repeat for provincial elections and the Rolling Stones playing at GM Place and anything else short of the American invasion of Iraq.
She met Kaleb in an organic market in Kits; they didn't meet cute -- she blew him off twice because she was stuck writing an article (on her advisor's pet project, which had nothing to do with her research) -- and then he had a conference in Norman, Oklahoma. But once they finally had a date, it was smooth sailing from there.
He was the first person to ask her why she was in grad school if it made her so unhappy. He was the first person she told that she had no idea what else to do with her life and was terrified of letting everyone down. Which at that point was just Mer, since their parents had done their tag-team cancer routine and passed within months of each other far too young.
Madison was... not precisely an accident. Jeannie distinctly remembers thinking that this was maybe the wrong time in her cycle to have skipped the condom... and then that she was actually okay with whatever happened. And whatever did happen, pretty much from the moment she peed on a stick and it turned blue. Kaleb proposed, Jeannie put in for a leave from school (her advisor was annoyed that he was losing the unpaid labor), she told Mer... who flipped. He flew up to Vancouver to try to talk her out of her decision -- whether that decision was to have the baby, marry Kaleb, or (temporarily, at the time) quit grad school, he was manifestly unclear -- and ended up flying out of her life after they both said things that should never be said to the only family you have left.
Jeannie changed her name upon marrying (which she'd thought she'd never do) in part because she wanted her new life to be as unlike the old one as possible. Jean Miller (wife, mother-to-be, amateur gardener) was born four months before Madison Elaine graced the world with her presence. It was awesome.
Jeannie is at Science World with Madison (and the rest of the school-age population, since it's a day off) when everyone starts buzzing about Beijing getting bombed. They are sitting outside with ice cream cones as the news moves through the crowds. This being Vancouver, everyone assumes it's the Americans doing the bombing. They end up hurrying home, but only because Maddie got chocolate ice cream all over herself and she's at the age where she will be Very, Very Upset if she can't ever wear her purple dress again because it's stained.
CBC News is still on by the time Kaleb gets home from work. The Americans have been holding press conferences left and right -- the President from the Oval Office, various generals from the Pentagon -- saying that it wasn't them. The Chinese aren't making any official statements, but the Russians seem inclined to accept the Americans' story.
"Who the hell is left?" Kaleb asks as he fills the kettle and turns it on. "It wasn't us."
The next morning, Jeannie's back from dropping Maddie off at school and about to start working (she's a freelance editor for a textbook company; the pay is good, the work boring, the hours perfect) when Kaleb calls. "Turn on the TV," he tells her. "Now it's Dhaka."
She turns the TV back on for long enough to see satellite imagery of the crater where the capital of Bangladesh used to be before she's out the door again to bring Madison back home. She doesn't know what's going on and neither does anyone else. The streets are crowded and tense, not quite panicked and yet she knows it's just a big car wreck away from breaking apart. It feels like a big disaster movie, except it's not all going to be over in two hours.
They're all back home by lunch. Maddie is not unaware of the mood shift around her, but she's easily distracted by Kaleb asking her to read him a story. Jeannie's in the kitchen plotting out a meal that won't involve heading to the market when the doorbell rings.
"Jean Miller?" an American military officer, one of two, asks. "Can we come in?"
Kaleb sends Maddie upstairs to play and joins her as the two Air Force officers... speak nonsense.
"Aliens," Jeannie repeats flatly after they finish their initial spiel. "We're being attacked by aliens. And you want me to help you fight them."
Kaleb is looking over Major Belgrave's shoulder, probably trying to figure out if he can get to the phone to dial for help without being overcome by the two men.
"We understand that this sounds... farfetched," Captain Bascom agrees. "But it will sound a little less so after the President makes his speech at the UN at 3 o'clock."
"No it won't," Belgrave retorts. "But it won't be two crazy Air Force officers telling it to you."
It's 2:45 and she's weirded out enough that she doesn't call the police and instead just makes tea for the four of them and they wait.
It's six on the East Coast and the President looks far more worn today than yesterday. He is joined on the podium by the Chinese and Russian ambassadors, but he's the only one talking. They've known about extraterrestrial life for more than a decade, he says -- first the Americans, then the Russians, then the Chinese, then a few select other nations. They've been fighting to keep the planet safe since then, to mostly acceptable results, but now they are facing a new enemy that is greater in number and technology than anything the 'Stargate Program' can bring to bear. Earth is the last major battleground for the Ori to conquer the galaxy and success is not guaranteed.
There is more -- to the speech, from the newscasters -- but Jeannie turns back to the men sitting in her kitchen. "Why me?"
Belgrave shrugs. "Because back when we were organizing our resources in preparation for this battle, someone put your name on a list of people we'd need."
She looks at Kaleb, who looks as confused as she feels. She's been nothing but a housewife and part-time editor for the last few years; her advisor -- who most certainly was not secretly working for this Stargate Program -- hadn't thought enough of her to ask when she was coming back from maternity leave, so he didn't volunteer her. "Who would do that?"
"Do you know a Doctor Rodney McKay?"
In the end, Jeannie accepts the offer because there's absolutely no alternative. Not that the Air Force would kidnap her in her sleep if she refused -- although with the revelations that have come out in the weeks since Beijing and Dhaka, she'd be markedly less surprised if they had -- but because she cannot imagine saying "no, I don't want to go try to save the world."
(In her heart of hearts, she can admit that it doesn't hurt that out of all of the people in all of the world, Mer -- Rodney -- thinks she's qualified. She's out of the game as far as academe goes, but that doesn't mean she doesn't still read the journals and keep up with the intellectual aspects. She knows her brother is a big shot, that his articles are treasured as much for their subject matter as for their relative rarity, that he's a lion on the veldt of astrophysics and his regard matters for more reasons than fraternal.)
On her first day in Colorado Springs, she is brought to 'the Mountain' and to an orientation session that is almost hilarious for its brevity in relation to the importance of their tasks. She introduces herself as "Mrs. Jean Miller", but nobody remembers (or cares) that she's still technically ABD and she's Doctor Miller to everyone by the end of the week. She stops caring because if this work isn't worth a doctorate, nobody's is.
She is assigned to a working group headed up by Arkady Kalprovsky, a brilliant (if paranoid and cranky) physicist, and their job is to create high-energy power sources. They have two days to learn everything about ZPMs before they're expected to start being productive.
Reading journals and going through problems in old textbooks is one thing; being part of the living, breathing organism of cutting-edge science is another. She doesn't sleep for two days because she's got that much more to catch up on than just wormholes and subspace particles.
They work almost nonstop; they sleep in shifts, they live on coffee, they set alarms to remind them of what day it is. It's supposed to be three weeks on, three days off, but almost everyone blows through their scheduled down-time without realizing that it's come and gone.
Jeannie doesn't. She books tickets back to Vancouver (ever more expensive with oil over $200/barrel and rising daily) and trades shifts and even buys Barr's furlough off of him to get extra time at home. Occasionally, they come down to Colorado Springs -- her SGC affiliation opens all sorts of doors, or at least gets them on to fully booked flights. Maddie and Kaleb are managing -- to the point that she wonders, at her most fatigued, if they even notice her absence -- but there's no pretending that anything is normal.
Jerusalem is obliterated during one of her visits home. Every church bell in Vancouver rings out in grief.
Life in any major city is now full of evacuation drills, emergency response tests, rationing of supplies to prevent hording, fear. It's like everywhere there's more than half a million people is now London during the Blitz. Nobody really thinks Vancouver is a target -- it's not the biggest city in Canada, it's not the biggest city on the Pacific Coast, it has no religious significance -- but it doesn't matter. Kaleb is part of the civilian safety patrol and Maddie has memorized where she has to go if the sirens sound when she's at school (and at home and a half-dozen other places). Jeannie has to show proof of area residency to go to the Shopper's Drug Mart around the corner.
"I want my world back," she tells Kaleb in the dark.
Life at the Mountain, by comparison, is oddly normal. For values of normal that were the reason she left academia in the first place. It's like the UBC physics department writ large -- no real concept of what is going on outside its doors and no real interest in finding out. Everyone is living solely for their work, forgetting in the process that those who aren't still have lives that matter, lives with meaning. Everyone here wants to save the world... but they have no idea what that is, it sometimes seems.
Kalprovsky mutters one day about her having a job here when this all blows over, but she knows that there's no way in hell she stays.
Mer's arrival at the Mountain is preceded by a couple of weeks of rumors and bitching. Nobody knows that she's Rodney McKay's sister and, judging by the way everyone talks about him, that's probably a ruse worth keeping up until she can't. Rodney McKay is an arrogant, insensitive, brilliant taskmaster and people can't seem to decide whether his arrival is going to be exactly what they need or the reason half of the science unit defects to the Ori.
She's mid-level staff now, here long enough and doing good enough work to be charged with the supervising of newer arrivals. Mer finds her doing what she'd pretty much sworn to never do -- conflate pedagogy with public shaming.
"Hey, Mer," she says, like they haven't spent most of the last decade being politely civil from a very long distance (two galaxies!) away.
In fact, the last decade almost doesn't matter, at least as far as their relationship goes. Most of the bases of their disagreements are moot -- she's back working in physics and he's accepted that she isn't divorcing Kaleb and returning Madison to the stork. With very little in the way of professional secrets -- he's sort of her boss's boss's boss -- almost everything he has to say is relevant and useful and Mer, for all of his well-deserved reputation for not suffering fools, is a brilliant teacher when he wants to be.
He's also there to re-arrange and re-assign and re-prioritize and, once it gets out that he's her brother, her social life (such as it is) takes an interesting twist.
But, in the end, there aren't mass defections to the Ori, Mer doesn't fire or humiliate nearly as many people as expected (there's a pool for how many people he makes cry; Jeannie almost wins it -- would have won it if Carrie Penner had just managed to keep a stiff upper lip), and he spends a week with Aeronautical Engineering's air defense subgroup doing something with their shield projections that has them all giddy with excitement. It's almost anticlimactic, except that in this warped, chaotic environment, when she has lost so much of everything, she finally has a brother again.
Early on, she told him about her discomfort with the disassociation here, the way it's too easy to see this as the research opportunity of a lifetime and forget that there are billions of people waiting to be saved. The blindness at the Mountain is two-fold -- they have the best 'view' of the other worlds and they are still living on this one and none of it seems to register. She thinks he understands, even if she's not sure he agrees. At least until she hears about him dragging the theoretical astrophysics group over to the stargate to watch the bloodied team operators stumble home.
The SG teams aren't the only ones losing people; there are entire project groups that are based off-world and, occasionally, one of them gets attacked. They lose so many people when P3X-367 is bombed that the research is set back months and there's nobody left to do anything but rebuild from scratch.
In her lab, among her people, Jeannie institutes a daily moment of silence -- 1100 usually, but it's flexible - where they stop what they're doing and think about everyone they've lost, everyone they've left behind, everyone back upstairs and outside who is counting on them to make this work. For herself, there is a whiteboard that she goes to every day and adds a name -- someone she knows. The first names are Kaleb's and Madison's, but after that it's her friends and neighbors and old roommates and even Mrs. Gordon, her second-grade teacher. The day she sees names appearing in handwriting not her own, she cries.
Her turn to be based off-world comes soon enough; she'd be almost okay with it -- she's been through a wormhole and she's been to P89-584 before and it's sort of like what Florida was before the Spanish landed -- but it wipes out her trip home. Kaleb and Maddie haven't been down in so long and Maddie cries on the phone to her, begging her to come home. She instead goes to Mer, hoping that he can do something.
He can't. He won't, actually, since she's learned that there's actually very little Mer can't make happen at the SGC. He's not a bastard about it, he's completely earnest in his assurances that she won't be gone a day longer than scheduled, and he even offers to get her ticket home re-done. She still ends up going back to her lab and sobbing.
Mer is there to wish her well when her team is stacked up at the stargate ready to depart. He gives her a hug, a Coffee Crisp, and a printed out confirmation that her flight to Vancouver has been rescheduled for the day after she returns. "Be brilliant," he tells her and she knows what he really means.
"I love you, too," she says, giving him a kiss on the cheek.
It's the last time she sees him, although she will not find out for weeks that he's been sent back to Atlantis.
They're off-world a week when the Ori armies land on Earth, attacking New York and somewhere in China. The attacks are repelled, but it's a cold comfort -- they all know that the ground forces are only showing up now because the Ori are sure it will be worth the effort. Jeannie is so scared for her family that she can't even do simple addition, let alone high-level physics. A message comes from the SGC two days later informing them that their families are being collected and will be waiting at the SGC for their return.
"They don't want us sneaking home to get them," Martin explains.
Once they return from space, it's a very emotional reunion for all of them. Maddie is hysterical and Jeannie can't stop herself crying long enough to soothe her.
The three of them live in her small studio quarters; it's not permanent, they're told. Teams will be relocated around the country and off-world as needed to keep the concentration in Colorado Springs from being too high. It's only a matter of time before the Ori bomb the place to hell -- the stargate is here, NORAD, Fort Carson, all of the Air Force bases -- and it's almost ironic that her family was brought here to be protected.
Maddie, thankfully, seems to be taking it in stride after her initial meltdown. She knows that they can't go home, even if she sometimes chooses not to remember, and her time is well-filled by activities and attempts at education -- they aren't going to send the kids to locals schools until they know who is staying and who is going. She still asks questions that her parents can't answer, though, like why can't her friend Maureen and her family come here, too, if this is where it's safe.
Kaleb has a harder time of it, Jeannie thinks, but he doesn't say much about it. They get brochures from Peterson's family assistance groups about being a military spouse and she thinks those help a little. He has no productive way to spend his time, is still Maddie's primary caregiver because Jeannie still works crazy hours, and the helplessness and uselessness (his words) bother him. They fight sometimes, but not a lot because Maddie's too old to not pick up on it.
A month in, they are told that they are moving to outside San Jose. Things are better there -- they have a small apartment (above ground, which is a not insignificant matter) and Maddie has a school and Kaleb has plenty to do while he's getting them set up in the apartment and in the neighborhood.
"You were Missus Mom back in Vancouver," he tells her. "I can be Mister Mom down here."
If it were as simple as that, it would have been bliss. But the world outside their apartment door is fracturing and shards cannot help but penetrate into their home. The Ori are here on Earth, taking over large swaths of the Third World -- they've pretty much annexed Africa -- and still desecrating any religiously significant location or artifact that they can find. Mecca and Jerusalem are abattoirs, the holy sites filling up with believers who will become martyrs, a cycle that has no end. The Ori went to Missouri, for pity's sake, to make sure the Mormons didn't think they would be faring any better.
The SGC is losing personnel, both military and civilian, at a dreadful pace. Jeannie can name a dozen people she'd at least shared a meal with who are now dead.
The Ori are learning about Earth telecommunications, too. They hijack television and radio channels and broadcast their messages direct to the people. They plead for understanding, for acceptance, for peace. They promise respite and prosperity and an end to suffering. They make it sound tempting and reasonable and make the SGC's attempt to drive them off as irrational and an act of war against their own planet.
"All we want is for you to see the wisdom of the Ori," one prior says. "We are not interested in punishing you. We will gladly welcome you into the light."
They stop watching television. Between the Ori infomercials and the footage of battles lost and won, there's nothing they want to see anymore.
They make breakthroughs at work, but never fast enough. There are so many high-priority requests on their time that all she ever feels is failure for disappointing them. She sleeps both too much and not enough; she's always tired, always worn in ways that have nothing to do with how much sleep she's getting.
Last year, she was baking a cake for Maddie's birthday, going to three different stores to find a purple tablecloth and purple napkins. This year, Kaleb has to remind her what day it is.
They get notice that they have to leave San Jose; they're going off-world again. Maddie is despondent -- she has friends here, like she had in Vancouver, and not even the prospect of living on another planet can make tearing her away again anything less than what it is. Kaleb, too, is uneasy -- he's not eager to go back to the aimlessness of their time at the SGC.
"I can quit," she tells him. She's been thinking about it more and more, fantasizing about the three of them back home in Vancouver, riding out whatever may come like the rest of the world who doesn't have supergenius brothers with hiring powers.
"No you can't," Kaleb tells her. "I'd rather be bored and Maddie be despondent than bowing down to aliens and calling them gods. You don't want to, either."
PX9-757 has weather like Vancouver.
When the Ori come, it's like out of a movie. She's seen the soldiers on TV, seen photos at the SGC, but when they come for her, it's like nothing she's ever seen. She feels like it's happening to someone else, like there's another Jeannie Miller who is watching the airmen fight and die, overrun by such an overwhelming force as to be almost laughable -- they sent an army to take over an outpost with less than fifty people.
They don't threaten to kill her. They bundle her along with the rest of the scientists -- all of their families, thankfully, were evacuated three days ago -- and bring them on board one of their massive toilet-bowl ships. She is treated not unkindly, given food and a bed and a place to wash. She is also given a Book of Origin and told to read it. She does, since there's precious little else to do.
Origin is not, on its face, an awful religion. There's a lot that would pass for Earth religion -- respect for your fellow man, obedience, self-control. There's a lot of violence, too -- a lot of smiting the unbelievers -- but so the Bible and the Koran have their nasty bits, too.
"It's just that all we're seeing are the nasty bits," she explains when her handlers ask. "You're not showing us any light except for the glow of your energy-based weapons systems."
The reply is some metaphor about weeding and fertile gardens and crops, but she's lived in a city all of her life and the farming stuff goes right by her. She tells them that, too.
She has no idea how long she's held, but eventually, they're all dumped on a planet. They don't even know which one.
"Did we just flunk out of Ori School?" Morgenthau asks.
They dial Earth. The SGC is happy to see them, but just as befuddled. The debriefings are endless, just as boring as the Ori versions except the only thing she has to read here is an old copy of Outdoor Life.
Once that's done with, she gets a week off. They go to Vancouver. She hopes it will be an oasis, an island of calm, but it's not. It's good, but there is too much wrong with the world now for it to be any kind of balm.
The estimated total death count for Earth is in the hundreds of millions. They think it will be at a billion before next summer. It's a catastrophe on a scale she can't even comprehend -- was this what it was like to live through the Black Plague? When it's over, will the world be a wasteland?
She breaks down crying when Maddie asks her how many zeroes are in a billion.
No longer a security risk, she's put back to work. Kalprovsky's got new people and they both need instruction in how to deal with their crazy boss and guidance in the ways of existing projects because some of them have some really brilliant ideas. The group makes a huge leap in October, something strong enough to go to prototype and then to testing. It's not a ZPM, but it's something they can physically hand over to the operational side and it feels good.
The good feelings don't last, though. They never do anymore. They had to change the font of the list of dead SGC personnel again, shrinking it down so that it would fit in the space. There are so many.
They are rotated between locations every few weeks; she and Kaleb decide to keep Maddie on Earth every other off-world rotation so that she isn't endlessly being uprooted. The separation isn't as hard as it should be; the hours are so long that whether there's anyone waiting make very little difference. Maddie is either resigned or acclimated; Jeannie can't tell and if Kaleb can, he's reluctant to say.
"What happens if we leave?" Pagat asks one day. They've been staring at a whiteboard full of equations for hours, to the point that the numbers and variables have ceased being intelligible and are instead a blurry pattern, like a Celtic knot of ungraspable knowledge.
"Nothing happens," Morgenthau says. "They replace us with someone else and hope it doesn't set the project back too far."
Like they do when one of them dies, he doesn't say.
"You thinking of going somewhere?" Martin asks, curious-but-not-really.
"I'm very tired," is all Pagat says. "Did we drop an integral sign on that fifth line?"
They did and the discussion goes in other directions. But Jeannie thinks about it later, lying on the cot in the curtained-off area that is her private space. She is very tired, too, and walking away from it all is not something that's never crossed her mind before.
The war is going badly and while there is a certain amount of honor in fighting until the end (or until death, which is perhaps the more likely outcome), she's maybe at the point where she can't see the point. She came here because she wanted to help save the planet and, through that, keep her daughter safe. She stays because of that, too, but she isn't sure if she's doing anything to save Maddie right now. There's no place in this galaxy that's safe for her, at least not without accepting the Ori.
She's never seen a world already converted to Origin. She's seen footage of places on Earth that have -- Sub-Saharan nations that are suddenly verdant and peaceful -- but she's not sure if that's typical or not. She knows that there's no more fighting on the converted worlds, though, because the SGC does not commit to overthrowing the Ori and the Ori stop fighting once they get what they want.
Peace in defeat is still peace.
They rotate back to Earth again, just in time for a dismal spate where the SGC loses more than a dozen people in as many days. South America is starting to fall to the Ori; Australia is on its last legs in a fight that even the sublevels of the Mountain know is bloody and costly. There are science teams down there and SG operator teams helping out the local forces and nobody thinks any of them are coming home.
The next off-world rotation is the one Kaleb and Maddie are supposed to come on, but they get evacuated back to Earth a week in when the SGC gets word that an attack might be imminent. It isn't, but they keep the non-essential personnel back on Earth anyway. Jeannie celebrates her wedding anniversary alone with a Ring-Ding.
Back on Earth, there's a fuss when Jonas Quinn is brought back to the SGC, more dead than alive, after having been missing for months, something that should be a joyous occasion but isn't because they know he was tortured and would've died if he hadn't been found by accident. Jeannie, having been both looked for by the SGC and not tortured by the Ori, wonders if there's been a change of policy and, if so, by whom.
She never stops believing that the Ori are wrong for demanding conversion or death. But she maybe stops believing that the SGC is right for demanding that Earth die resisting.
Once she realizes that, once she accepts it, it feels like a weight has been lifted. She doesn't know why. It's not like she can act on her newfound insight, not like she can tell anyone -- not even Kaleb, whose commitment to the cause has been greater than her own for some time now, a turn of events she had never anticipated because Kaleb's causes have never been so large in scale or scope and she always liked that about him.
Nonetheless, she is aware that she's not alone, that others feel as she does.
There is new work to be done at the Antarctic base; the Asgard have coughed up something that they've been able to convert into a power supply for the weapons platform down there and suddenly there's a surge of human energy at the Mountain. With the chair operational, they'll be able to fight back against the Ori with the Ancients' own weapons. The chair's become something like a grail; the Ancients are sort of like the Ori's cousins and everyone thinks that that familial resemblance will mean that the weapons will be more effective.
"They're going to be spraying a garden hose at a hornet's nest," Sesniak says when that comes up during a long session of checking each other's work. "And we're the poor fucks having a picnic nearby."
It's all a moot point right now anyway -- they've just now figured out who (besides General O'Neill) can operate the chair and it'll be weeks (or months) before they're ready to use it as a weapon. But it's a conversation she comes back to because it's the first time she remembers hearing someone speak their disillusionment out loud.
She cannot save her daughter by building a better bomb or battery -- she cannot save anyone. All she's doing is helping to aim the hose at the hornets.
Kaleb gave her the courage to be brave, even when the most important people in her life wouldn't understand her choices. What happens afterward is not on impulse or in reaction to anything in particular. It's not done without regret, but it is done without remorse.
eta: Loyaulte Me Lie = "Loyalty Binds Me", the motto of Richard III