Aberrant: Stargate Universe - Major Damien Caine

[Mr Fox]

... The forest was dark and no starlight filtered through the thick canopy above. Captain Caine was forging ahead of his squad trying to pick out the trail of where SG5 had gone with nothing but a pair of night vision goggles to cut through the darkness. Not that he was the best scout in the group, but it was his turn to take the lead. There was something on the ground. He distinctly remembered stooping over to look at what it might be and motioning the men behind him to move forward while he investigated. It was a wrapper for a power bar.

That was the point at which the memory always got fuzy. From there he remembered catching up with the others as they entered a clearing. He remembered what looked like a tall stone altar with a crystal at the top or something like that. It looked old, very old.

That was when he noticed the bodies. Three men in uniform lay around the clearing. One near the altar and two others in what would have been classic guard positions covering the first. There should have been another, but maybe he was on the other side of the clearing, Caine couldn't see anything on the other side of the big stone monument. Again the memories got confused. He remembered thinking about his wife and how she had begged him to take some leave so they could go visit her cousin's new house in Hawaii. He was due some leave, he'd been on three missions back to back with no down time...

Caine frowned again, that wasn't right. He didn't have a wife with a cousin in Hawaii, that was Brinkman.

He remembered checking the bodies one at a time while the others waited at the edge of the thicket. No pulses. Damn, Smith just had a daughter a month ago! Jolie was her name, they'd had breakfast together the day before and she'd seen pictures. She was a perfect little girl. The kind she hoped to have with Tom someday, if she ever got around to it.

Again Caine snapped out of it and refocused, that was Helen Norman's memory...

Then he was looking at a set of glowing symbols in what looked like Ancient on the front of the stone. The symbols seemed to be calling to his mind. Without conscious thought he was reaching toward the fifth symbol and then he was touching it. Light filled him, it was all there was of the universe. Light filled them all. For the longest time he didn't know who he was.

Was he Caine standing at the edge of the clearing and facing the forest looking for threats? Or was he Pulanski touching the symbol on the Ancient device? Or Norman, or Rothman, or Smith, or Jenkins? They were all there in his head. All part of the light.

And then it was dark. Dark for a long time as he lay on the ground heart barely beating, chest barely rising and falling.

The next clear memory Caine had was waking up in the SGC infirmary with General O'neil standing over him looking concerned.

Over the next week they'd debriefed him at least a dozen times asking question after question about the device, and what had happened. It didn't help that he kept responding to questions as if he were one of the other team members. The shrinks nearly had a field day with that. Luckily, they'd been distracted by the arrival of a pair of others in the infirmary after a few days, and by the time they'd gotten around to measuring him for a straight jacket Caine was back to his old self. Or at least mostly. He still kept catching himself thinking someone else's thoughts now and then. Best not to mention that to the shrinks though or they'd never let him get back to duty.

[Adrian Moss]

They didn't keep him in a cell, but he was confined to the facility. It might have seemed like a prison to another man, but a military base was as home as home could be to Damien. What hurt was knowing that his fellow SG team members were going out on missions while he had to stay back - on a mental.

Well, he wouldn't let that happen forever. He would beat this and get back in the saddle, back in the game. He would get a clear mental check-up and get cleared for duty. It didn't matter to him how this episode would impact his record. Hell, he was still alive, which was more then he could say for his team mates.

He passed Evanson from SG-9. They made small talk for a few seconds before Evanson excused himself. Damien reached down and swore not to feel sorry for himself. He wouldn't be the burned out guy that was so clearly seen in Evanson's eyes. He had liked those eyes when they went to the Air Force Academy together. That had to be Norman.

While he could roam the halls, there were so many rooms that were off-limits to him now. His security clearance had been curtailed. He couldn't meet any of the brains in Technical, or see someone in archives to double check on his next mission. That was Rothman. Damien had never been to Technical. He wasn't bringing any new tech back now, anyway. Neither of them were being assigned any missions.

He heard the alarm klaxon alerting the base that a team was coming in hot. He saw people running to their combat alert stations. Damien wanted to join them - go straight to the gate, lift his weapon, and face down anything that was following their boys and girls home. That was him, pretty much, but he could feel a joint concensus in memories and impulses.

Instead he stood out of the way. Damien found himself gravitating toward the armory. If, maybe, things went bad he could take up a weapon and get back in the fight. It was a horrible thing for him to wish for and he knew it. He wasn't sure who thought of that, but it could have been him.

Nothing came of the alert that reached his ears. He went to medical but nobody showed up with any injuries. Maybe it had been a close call. He couldn't get into the circle of officers that would be dicussing such things. Damien was in a nebulous space between being an officer in the SGC and a liability - a mental case.

There was a card game tonight in the NCO's quarters. He could get in with a $100 dollar ante. Was that Pulanski? He couldn't be sure anymore.

He saw one of the doctors had made a miscalculations in a patients and he had to stop him from making a notation. He wasn't a doctor, that was Jenkins. Damien wanted to pound his head against the wall.

This doesn't make sense he wanted to cry out. Instead, he sat down and began identifying who was who in his head. Behind all the voices of his friends and collegues was another voice, barely a whisper. Damien didn't know what was worse; the alien nature of the whisper or the fact that he was beginning to understand it.