Second Chances by Mad Maudlin (Amnesty 2008, Role Reversal)
Title: Second Chances
Author: mad_maudlin
Rating: PG
Length: ~1,500
Spoilers: 1x01 "Rising"
Summary: Jack dropped the file on the table top and scratched the back of his head. "If we were still sending people to the moon, that might be his next stop, except I think there was a rule about bringing those guys back."
A/N: for the Role Reversal challenge on SGA_Flashfic. Not what I started for it, but sometimes the muse just takes you, y'know? Self-beta'd, so alerts on any lingering typos would be appreciated.
Second Chances
Elizabeth supposed that bureaucratic stupidity should no longer fail to shock her, but the administrative mistakes that lead to an armed drone weapon being shipped unsecured through McMurdo en route to Area 51 were absolutely staggering. The fact that it had been activated from such a distance, that was more than slightly troubling. And when she learned exactly how the drone had been contained and disarmed, she made certain to have Jack O'Neill on the phone within the hour.
"How did we miss him?" she asked as soon as he arrived.
Jack smiled thinly. "Hello, Dr. Weir. It's lovely to see you, too. How's the dog?"
"You know who I'm talking about, General," she said, leading him into the conference room.
"I do, unfortunately," Jack said. He was carrying a full-sized backpack, but the folder he extracted from it was fairly thin. "And before we start, I officially reserve the right to say 'I told you so.'"
"About what?"
"About McKay." Jack sat and put his feet up on an empty chair. "You don't want him, Elizabeth. The guy's plutonium. Not even his own country wants him around-there's a reason he's down here on ice."
"His own country?" Elizabeth echoed; she'd just assumed that McKay was American. "Where is he from?"
"Canada. Stationed here as part of an officer-exchange agreement with, of all people, the Russians." Jack waved the folder at her. "Do you want to read it yourself or get the edited highlights?"
Elizabeth folded her arms. "Give me the outline for now."
"Suit yourself." Jack sighed, and squinted at the page in such a way that Elizabeth suspected he either secretly needed reading glasses or would need them very shortly. "Rodney McKay, born April 18, 1968 in Toronto, Ontario, yadda yadda yadda. Got his bachelor's in physics from Northwestern University in 1988, but got the boot from his Ph.D. program in astrophysics after he accused another student of plagiarizing his work--the academic conduct board cleared the target, but McKay wouldn't let it drop, and his behavior got so out of hand he lost his funding and was told he was no longer welcome on campus."
Elizabeth winced. "Is that when he joined the military?"
"Enlisted as an officer in 1991, by which point both parents are recorded as deceased, paperwork indicates he had a small fortune in student loans to pay off and was claiming a younger sister as a dependent." Jack flipped over a few pages of the file. "Canadian Forces found somebody willing to enroll him, because he's got a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and blah blah blah...seems he spent many a good year at the Ministry of Defense doing absolutely nothing of interest whatsoever, unless you count a truly impressive number of disciplinary citations and sexual harassment complaints. That is, until a recruiting shortfall lead to him being transferred on short notice to a combat engineering unit and deployed in Afghanistan." Jack paused. "That's where things get messy."
"How messy?" she asked.
"You remember in the news a couple months ago, a guy the press were calling Go-Go Jimmy?"
Elizabeth did, though she'd been in Africa at the time and gotten the story only in bits and pieces. "The F-16 pilot, right?" she asked. "He was involved in a friendly fire incident with...oh, god, no."
"Yep," Jack said grimly. "Jimmy dropped his payload right down McKay's shorts, but they part you want to hear wasn't really in the press."
"There was a convoy ambushed by insurgents, right?" Elizabeth asked, straining her memory.
"Eventually," Jack said. "They were on their way back to base when a truck ran over a mine, blocked off the whole road. Captain McKay was ordered to return to base with as many people as vehicles as he could, but he decided, in his infinite wisdom, that leaving part of the company and half their vehicles on the open road was unacceptable, so he ignored his commander and started trying to clear the wreck."
"Sounds like they would've been ambushed whether he stayed or not," Elizabeth pointed out.
"Yeah, but this way the whole convoy got pinned down instead of just part of it," Jack shot back. "And the only thing that saved his career was that Go-Go Jimmy couldn't find his target with both hands and a GPS. McKay requested air support, the F-16s were on a patrol...boom."
"I don't think I ever heard what happened in the end," Elizabeth admitted.
Jack made a face and referred back to the file. "Major James Gauthier was cleared of any official wrongdoing. Apparently there was a problem with the way the coordinates were relayed to him, and he was either too buzzed on caffeine pills or stupid to verify visually. Fifteen members of McKay's company were killed, but nobody could figure out if it was the insurgents or the bomb that got most of them. And the Canadian Forces had a little PR problem on their hands."
Oh, Elizabeth could see that. "Let me guess," she said. "They didn't want to be seen punishing the victim of the big bad American pilot, who was only trying to protect his men."
"Especially since 'following orders' was half of Jimmy's defense," Jack said grimly. "They kept McKay out of the press during the trial, for the most part, but if it got out they'd touched a hair on his head...well. You know politics better than I do, Doctor."
"So they sent him to Antarctica?" Elizabeth asked.
"They sent him to Siberia," Jack said. "An intensive cold-weather survival course followed by six months in an officer exchange program with the Russians, but even they couldn’t stand him, so he got dumped off down here, researching magnets or something." He dropped the file on the table top and scratched the back of his head. "If we were still sending people to the moon, that might be his next stop, except I think there was a rule about bringing those guys back."
Elizabeth rubbed her temples for a moment. "So if I ask you for your official recommendation, you'd say...?"
"Run away," Jack said. "Run far, far away."
"That's your tactical opinion?"
"I'm serious, Dr. Weir," Jack said. "The guy embarrasses me, and we're not even from the same country. He's insubordinate, incompetent, and he's got a medical file thicker than Daniel's. It might be kind of funny to watch Marshall Sumner have an aneurysm when you propose it, but it's my official opinion that McKay is a menace to the armed forces and the kindest thing we could do--to ourselves--is to pretend we never heard of him."
"I'll be sure to take that under advisement," Elizabeth said.
Jack groaned and looked to the ceiling. "You're going to push it, aren't you?" he said. "Why would you push it?"
She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on the table. "General, you may see Captain McKay as incompetent, but he was the only one to figure out how to get that drone out of the hangar. Not only that, but he was able to contain it in an ice cave, and--despite the fact that he's never seen Ancient technology before in his life, and does not test as having the ATA gene--he somehow managed to disarm the warhead before it exploded."
"Beginner's luck?" Jack suggested.
"There are people in this facility who've been working on that problem for weeks without the same level of success," Elizabeth said, ignoring the jibe. "Whatever his failings as an officer, as an engineer the man is brilliant, and we can't afford to wait for him to retire or resign."
"Or he could get eaten by a walrus," Jack suggested, deadpan. "That happens, you know."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "I sense that I'm not persuading you."
Jack sighed, and took his feet off the chair so he could look at her straight on. "Dr. Weir, you're a civilian, so you aren't going to see this from the same perspective. Guy goes out and disobeys orders because it's the 'right thing to do,' to you--to most of the public--he's some big romantic hero. But the military can't function without discipline and chain of command. I guarantee you that if you bring this guy onto the Atlantis project, you're going to find it's not so heroic when it's your orders he's disobeying."
She nodded. "I supposed I only have two words for that, General."
"Which are?"
"Pot," she said crisply. "Kettle."
Jack clutched at his heart. "That hurts me, Dr. Weir," he said. "And it's an insult to either pots or kettles, to boot."
She pulled the file on McKay across the table to herself, mentally adding it to her to-be-read list. "Besides," she added, "how do we know Captain McKay hasn't learned something from all this?"
"You'll want to look at the last two pages of that," Jack said. "Complaints issued against him since he got here."
Well, that took the wind from her sails slightly. But she continued, "There's no way to know what he might do with a second chance until we make the offer. It's not like he has anywhere to go but up."
"People always say that," Jack said ominously. "And then someone else has to say 'I told you so.'"
Author: mad_maudlin
Rating: PG
Length: ~1,500
Spoilers: 1x01 "Rising"
Summary: Jack dropped the file on the table top and scratched the back of his head. "If we were still sending people to the moon, that might be his next stop, except I think there was a rule about bringing those guys back."
A/N: for the Role Reversal challenge on SGA_Flashfic. Not what I started for it, but sometimes the muse just takes you, y'know? Self-beta'd, so alerts on any lingering typos would be appreciated.
Second Chances
Elizabeth supposed that bureaucratic stupidity should no longer fail to shock her, but the administrative mistakes that lead to an armed drone weapon being shipped unsecured through McMurdo en route to Area 51 were absolutely staggering. The fact that it had been activated from such a distance, that was more than slightly troubling. And when she learned exactly how the drone had been contained and disarmed, she made certain to have Jack O'Neill on the phone within the hour.
"How did we miss him?" she asked as soon as he arrived.
Jack smiled thinly. "Hello, Dr. Weir. It's lovely to see you, too. How's the dog?"
"You know who I'm talking about, General," she said, leading him into the conference room.
"I do, unfortunately," Jack said. He was carrying a full-sized backpack, but the folder he extracted from it was fairly thin. "And before we start, I officially reserve the right to say 'I told you so.'"
"About what?"
"About McKay." Jack sat and put his feet up on an empty chair. "You don't want him, Elizabeth. The guy's plutonium. Not even his own country wants him around-there's a reason he's down here on ice."
"His own country?" Elizabeth echoed; she'd just assumed that McKay was American. "Where is he from?"
"Canada. Stationed here as part of an officer-exchange agreement with, of all people, the Russians." Jack waved the folder at her. "Do you want to read it yourself or get the edited highlights?"
Elizabeth folded her arms. "Give me the outline for now."
"Suit yourself." Jack sighed, and squinted at the page in such a way that Elizabeth suspected he either secretly needed reading glasses or would need them very shortly. "Rodney McKay, born April 18, 1968 in Toronto, Ontario, yadda yadda yadda. Got his bachelor's in physics from Northwestern University in 1988, but got the boot from his Ph.D. program in astrophysics after he accused another student of plagiarizing his work--the academic conduct board cleared the target, but McKay wouldn't let it drop, and his behavior got so out of hand he lost his funding and was told he was no longer welcome on campus."
Elizabeth winced. "Is that when he joined the military?"
"Enlisted as an officer in 1991, by which point both parents are recorded as deceased, paperwork indicates he had a small fortune in student loans to pay off and was claiming a younger sister as a dependent." Jack flipped over a few pages of the file. "Canadian Forces found somebody willing to enroll him, because he's got a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and blah blah blah...seems he spent many a good year at the Ministry of Defense doing absolutely nothing of interest whatsoever, unless you count a truly impressive number of disciplinary citations and sexual harassment complaints. That is, until a recruiting shortfall lead to him being transferred on short notice to a combat engineering unit and deployed in Afghanistan." Jack paused. "That's where things get messy."
"How messy?" she asked.
"You remember in the news a couple months ago, a guy the press were calling Go-Go Jimmy?"
Elizabeth did, though she'd been in Africa at the time and gotten the story only in bits and pieces. "The F-16 pilot, right?" she asked. "He was involved in a friendly fire incident with...oh, god, no."
"Yep," Jack said grimly. "Jimmy dropped his payload right down McKay's shorts, but they part you want to hear wasn't really in the press."
"There was a convoy ambushed by insurgents, right?" Elizabeth asked, straining her memory.
"Eventually," Jack said. "They were on their way back to base when a truck ran over a mine, blocked off the whole road. Captain McKay was ordered to return to base with as many people as vehicles as he could, but he decided, in his infinite wisdom, that leaving part of the company and half their vehicles on the open road was unacceptable, so he ignored his commander and started trying to clear the wreck."
"Sounds like they would've been ambushed whether he stayed or not," Elizabeth pointed out.
"Yeah, but this way the whole convoy got pinned down instead of just part of it," Jack shot back. "And the only thing that saved his career was that Go-Go Jimmy couldn't find his target with both hands and a GPS. McKay requested air support, the F-16s were on a patrol...boom."
"I don't think I ever heard what happened in the end," Elizabeth admitted.
Jack made a face and referred back to the file. "Major James Gauthier was cleared of any official wrongdoing. Apparently there was a problem with the way the coordinates were relayed to him, and he was either too buzzed on caffeine pills or stupid to verify visually. Fifteen members of McKay's company were killed, but nobody could figure out if it was the insurgents or the bomb that got most of them. And the Canadian Forces had a little PR problem on their hands."
Oh, Elizabeth could see that. "Let me guess," she said. "They didn't want to be seen punishing the victim of the big bad American pilot, who was only trying to protect his men."
"Especially since 'following orders' was half of Jimmy's defense," Jack said grimly. "They kept McKay out of the press during the trial, for the most part, but if it got out they'd touched a hair on his head...well. You know politics better than I do, Doctor."
"So they sent him to Antarctica?" Elizabeth asked.
"They sent him to Siberia," Jack said. "An intensive cold-weather survival course followed by six months in an officer exchange program with the Russians, but even they couldn’t stand him, so he got dumped off down here, researching magnets or something." He dropped the file on the table top and scratched the back of his head. "If we were still sending people to the moon, that might be his next stop, except I think there was a rule about bringing those guys back."
Elizabeth rubbed her temples for a moment. "So if I ask you for your official recommendation, you'd say...?"
"Run away," Jack said. "Run far, far away."
"That's your tactical opinion?"
"I'm serious, Dr. Weir," Jack said. "The guy embarrasses me, and we're not even from the same country. He's insubordinate, incompetent, and he's got a medical file thicker than Daniel's. It might be kind of funny to watch Marshall Sumner have an aneurysm when you propose it, but it's my official opinion that McKay is a menace to the armed forces and the kindest thing we could do--to ourselves--is to pretend we never heard of him."
"I'll be sure to take that under advisement," Elizabeth said.
Jack groaned and looked to the ceiling. "You're going to push it, aren't you?" he said. "Why would you push it?"
She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on the table. "General, you may see Captain McKay as incompetent, but he was the only one to figure out how to get that drone out of the hangar. Not only that, but he was able to contain it in an ice cave, and--despite the fact that he's never seen Ancient technology before in his life, and does not test as having the ATA gene--he somehow managed to disarm the warhead before it exploded."
"Beginner's luck?" Jack suggested.
"There are people in this facility who've been working on that problem for weeks without the same level of success," Elizabeth said, ignoring the jibe. "Whatever his failings as an officer, as an engineer the man is brilliant, and we can't afford to wait for him to retire or resign."
"Or he could get eaten by a walrus," Jack suggested, deadpan. "That happens, you know."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "I sense that I'm not persuading you."
Jack sighed, and took his feet off the chair so he could look at her straight on. "Dr. Weir, you're a civilian, so you aren't going to see this from the same perspective. Guy goes out and disobeys orders because it's the 'right thing to do,' to you--to most of the public--he's some big romantic hero. But the military can't function without discipline and chain of command. I guarantee you that if you bring this guy onto the Atlantis project, you're going to find it's not so heroic when it's your orders he's disobeying."
She nodded. "I supposed I only have two words for that, General."
"Which are?"
"Pot," she said crisply. "Kettle."
Jack clutched at his heart. "That hurts me, Dr. Weir," he said. "And it's an insult to either pots or kettles, to boot."
She pulled the file on McKay across the table to herself, mentally adding it to her to-be-read list. "Besides," she added, "how do we know Captain McKay hasn't learned something from all this?"
"You'll want to look at the last two pages of that," Jack said. "Complaints issued against him since he got here."
Well, that took the wind from her sails slightly. But she continued, "There's no way to know what he might do with a second chance until we make the offer. It's not like he has anywhere to go but up."
"People always say that," Jack said ominously. "And then someone else has to say 'I told you so.'"