AUTHOR'S NOTES: Jacob's no idiot. He knows when the wool is being pulled over his eyes, and if he's anything like my Dad, when it involves his daughter…you'd better watch out, General Hammond! Thanks to jenni for beta-ing!

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George, I hope you know what you're doing. This is my little girl we're talking about here - although she's not so little anymore, she's grown up and beautiful, and so like her mother it takes my breath away. Whatever secret thingamabob it is you're working on, George, you'd better take damn good care of her, because I'm not going to be around much longer to do so.

There, I've said it. I've faced up to it.

Gets easier every time.

Except when I'm looking into her eyes and telling her about the cancer.

Then it's incredibly hard.

It's even harder once I offer her the place in NASA…and she refuses. She refuses!

All her life, she's wanted to get into space. My little astronaut - astrophysics, the Air-Force - it was always her dream.

I offer her a dream job and she turns it down.

Holy Hannah, George, what is happening in that mountain of yours? Deep space radio telemetry, my ass! My little girl would never pass up the chance to see space - and yet she has. For no reason that she could explain to me.

It terrifies me, George. It terrifies me to the depths of my soul - and all the more since that Colonel walked into the room beside her. Her commanding officer, huh? I never saw a man less likely to work on 'deep space radio telemetry'. Show me the frontline and this man will be there and in a command position. It took one look at him and less than a dozen words from his mouth for me to know that.

Who is this Colonel, George? Because one look at the man and my every paternal hackle goes up - this is not a man I want anywhere near my daughter! This man stands beside her and smiles with her, but there's something in his demeanour around her that I don't like. She's my daughter, George, but you let that man work beside her and whether or not he knows it he marks her as his - and regulations be damned.

Do you remember the regs, George? Do you? You bent them when you thought there was good cause, while I walked the precise line that demarcated right and wrong. For all that we were the best of friends, I could never cross that line, and you could never see why not. That was the difference between us, it was always so and it's the same even now.

Bend the rules enough, and tell me what do you do in that mountain of yours, George! What is it that captures my Samantha and holds her so rapt in her work?

I'm dying, George, and I need to know that my daughter is cared for.

I need to know that she's safe.

What do you do in that mountain, George?

* fin *