[email protected]
It was just another thing that John missed about Atlantis�the list was reaching epic proportions, the likes of which he didn�t have anything to liken to except for possibly the Christmas list his sister Angela had had the year John was five and Angela had wanted everything from hair clip things to a pony. On Atlantis he never had to respond to names other than �John�, �Major�, �Sheppard�, or �sir�, or, occasionally, some combination of the four. On Earth, though, it seemed that he had a different moniker for every person he encountered. The ever-generic �you there� was popular, as was �airman� and �hey you with the hair�. He had even met up with an old buddy stationed at Area 51 who enjoyed calling him �moron� among other more colourful names whenever they saw each other.
All that he could deal with though. He knew that being a visitor on a base generally meant that you were unwanted in one way or another, and as for his old buddy� well, John had some names for him, too, and none of them were complimentary.
What John hated most, though, was being called �Shep�.
Like all pilots he had a call sign. Marines, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, National Guard, whatever branch of service all pilots had call signs. It was something that happened when you get certified on your first bird, oftentimes even before that. Just like the shiny gold wings that he, thankfully, didn�t have to wear every day (except that while he was at Nellis he had to wear them unless he was in a flight suit, and then there was a pair of wings sewn onto the fabric of the flight suit) having a call sign was a rite of passage for any flyer. John honestly couldn�t remember what unimaginative soul had saddled him with �Shep� but, to his extreme dismay, the call sign as stuck after flight training, through four war-zone deployments, a near Court Marshall, and, finally, to his exile at McMurdo.
No one on Atlantis called him �Shep�.
John had arrived in Nevada twelve hours earlier, had been assigned quarters in the BOQ where he had dropped his small bag of clothes and his laptop, as well as the crate and a half of files on potential military personnel for the next wave of the Atlantis expedition, and then he had been given a thick package of information on the X-302�s that he needed to read before he could actually see the inside of one. He�d read everything in the package twice, most of it just reiterating what Sam had told him before he left Colorado, then he had been introduced to a scientist who was basically a plane captain with a PhD who had given him a perfunctory tour of one of the 303�s before being called away with some emergency in one of the labs.
Since he couldn�t do any actual training until the next day�though he had tried, casually, to get started that night; the person he�d talked to had thought he was an eager Flyboy looking for a new fast ride while, really, as much as he was that eager Flyboy looking for a new fast ride, the reason he wanted to get started was that he wanted to get his training over with as soon as he could so that he could get back to Colorado Springs. If anyone were to ask him, though he couldn�t think of anyone who would, he wanted to get back so that he could start interviewing people for positions in the military section of the City. The truth, however, was that he missed Elizabeth more than he should have considering how many times a day they talked on the phone. Still, he was used to seeing her at least a handful of times a day, talking to her whenever he wanted to, and hanging out with her when he got bored which happened a lot if he was in the City with nothing to do for too long. And being back on Earth was worse because all the places he�d been�Colorado Springs, Nellis Air Force Base�he had been before, so after he�d explored the SGC and made sure to purchase all the things he�d been asked by friends back in the City to bring from Earth, he�d been bored in Colorado Springs, and he had barely been at Area 51 for a day and already he was bored out of his skull. Of course, it didn�t help matters that he wasn�t allowed to go exploring beyond the hanger, the R-and-D lab for the 302�s, and the general base area outside the actual structure of Area 51, and the fact that the only person stationed at Groom Lake that he knew was someone he didn�t particularly like certainly didn�t help.
All those things, plus the fact that he wasn�t feeling very social , were why, after finding out that he couldn�t start training until the morning, John had gone back to his quarters at the BOQ and started to go through personnel files. He was pretty certain that he wasn�t going to be the military leader of the expedition for much longer, and, while any decision on personnel he made while he was could easily be overturned by the new commander, having nothing to show for all the time he�d been on Earth was no way to keep his place on AR-1 at the very least.
Flopping down in a chair at the desk John opened the first file.
Young Marine, Lieutenant Laura Cadman. High temperature and energetic materials expert. Expert marksman. Two years off-world experience with SG-19. He wasn�t quite sure how she�d gotten into the Marines with her diminutive height�she measured out at five feet two inches�but there was no indication in her file that she had ever been unable to do something because she was of a smaller