STARGATE SG-1 STARGATE ATLANTIS: Points of Origin - Volume Two of the Travelers' Tales (SGX-03) (STARGATE EXTRA (SGX-03))

by Karen Miller

  No, George had told nobody about that. Maybe someday he would. Maybe someday he’d tell a friend.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  “Because we know you,” the man said. “Will know you. For some reason, thirty years ago you decided we were going to need help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing there with that note. Are you going to listen to yourself? Or not?”

  George looked from one to the other. Carter was waiting, her mouth slightly open as though she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure if she should. Spies. An elaborate practical joke. Some kind of test of command potential. All of those were possible. But why would spies have the equipment wrong? That wasn’t the kind of mistake Soviet agents would make. However, it was the kind of thing that would happen naturally in the future. The shade of fatigues would change. The make of the standard issue ordnance would change. But it would be a stupid mistake for spies to make, and spies weren’t stupid except in movies.

  A practical joke? A test of command potential? But how did they get the note? How did they get a note in his handwriting that he was sure he hadn’t written?

  Hadn’t written yet. As Sherlock Holmes said, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true. He had not written that note in the past. So he must have written it in the future.

  George holstered his pistol. Instead he got the handcuff keys out. “There are two other men including the driver.”

  “Thank you,” the older man said as he unlocked them, a heartfelt thanks that bore out that this was not a joke or a test.

  He bent to unlock Carter’s cuffs, and she winced. There was a long stapled cut on her right hand. He turned it into the light. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “Did I hurt you?”

  “It’s captain,” she said, and then smiled as she glanced at his insignia. “And it’s alright — Lieutenant.” She looked like that pleased her for some reason. “May I see the note?”

  He sat down next to her to get it out of his breast pocket.

  The older man leaned forward. “Look, we don’t want to hurt anyone, but we are going to have to knock those guys out somehow.”

  George pulled out the ray gun. “Will this do?”

  He’d done what the note said. He’d helped them. And for his pains they’d stunned him with the ray gun and left him lying in the middle of the road with his men. Which, as the one who was probably O’Neill and not Skywalker had said, probably saved him from court martial. He’d been reprimanded, of course. He’d stood like a stone with his ears burning while he heard some things about “complete incompetence” and “tom-fool kids who fall for the oldest tricks in the book”. He’d kept his eyes forward and done his best to sound like the kind of dumb jarhead who couldn’t possibly have imagined that the prisoners might escape. In the end they’d bought it. After all, which was more likely? That he had a message from the future or that he was wet behind the ears and gullible?

  Unless they got caught. He’d waited. He’d thought. They’d get caught, surely, in those first days, those first months. Any day they’d be recaptured and there would be more questions. Months turned into a year and nothing happened. Not another word. Wherever Carter and the other people from the future had gone, they’d disappeared entirely from his world. Carter. O’Neill. And the others whose names he didn’t know. He’d probably never know what happened to them.

  Thirteen months later he woke up in the middle of the night in flight school, a realization on the tip of his tongue. Of course he’d know. He’d see them again to hand them the note. In twenty-nine years he’d be a general just as she’d said, and there would be time travel. He was living inside a story more marvelous than anything Bradbury or Heinlein had ever written and it was true. He was the protagonist, the one man in the world who knew what the future held. He was either crazy or uniquely blessed, and it was probably the latter. George Hammond had a date with the future.

  Above North Vietnam, November 2, 1971

  “Shelby one-two, I’ve got five bogeys at seven o’clock. About four miles out.” Belzebub’s voice crackled in his headset. “Hey, you hear me, Lone Star?”

  “Roger,” Lone Star, aka George Hammond, replied. “I see them. You got an egress plan?” Five bogeys were a lot of Russian MiG fighters, and there were only two of them, even without one salient fact. “I’ve got one Sidewinder. That’s one.” All his other missiles had been fired over the target. It had been a long ground support mission, and the rest of his ordnance had been expended.

  Belzebub didn’t sound more hurried than usual. “Turn to 035. That’ll bring us out on top of Paper Doll.” Paper Doll was the USS Santa Fe, lying twelve miles off the coast of North Vietnam. The Santa Fe had surface to air missiles aplenty and could cover them. The MiGs would be crazy to follow into that kind of fire.

  “Roger that.” Now if they were lucky, the MiGs would have already used up their missiles too… He turned his Phantom, the plane quick and responsive in his hands. It was a sweet fighter, no doubt about that, but somehow the Pentagon, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to arm them with missiles only. They had no cannon, no guns. Once the missiles were fired, the Phantoms were unarmed. But then they weren’t supposed to need them. Strategic doctrine coming down from the highest levels said that the war could be won without dogfights, without the air to air one on one combat that was now as antique as the biplanes that had first fought it. This was the age of the machine. It was the age of clean war, won from above by bombers who never saw the targets they hit. There would never again be a need for solitary heroics.

  Bullshit.

  Belzebub twisted, putting his Phantom into a near-vertical climb as one of the MiGs fired an air to air missile.

  George’s headset shrieked with the warning tone for missile launch. “Got one on you.”

  “Roger, dropping chaff.” Belzebub’s voice was only a little fast, his radar signature blurring as he released the strips of blowing tinfoil that were supposed to confuse the missile.

  “I’m on this guy. Tally ho.” George dropped instead, pulling away from Belzebub and the falling chaff, the missile chasing it. The MiG wouldn’t quite resolve in his sights, bobbing and weaving as he tried to get a lock on it. Together pursuer and pursued streaked over the green hills. “Down on deck,” George said, dropping through 1,500 feet.

  “Get me a lock,” his gunner said. “Half a second.”

  “Roger that,” George said. “I’m on him, Frank.” A tone alerted, and in the split second the lock held Frank fired their last Sidewinder.

  The MiG was fast, but the Sidewinder accelerated at better than twice the speed of sound, faster than the MiG’s climb. It caught it at the junction of wing and body, a bright flare of explosion rendered perfectly silent by distance. George doubled back, turning over the emerald forests and beginning to rise. “Belzebub, I am returning to our exit corridor.” A few minutes and they’d be over the ocean, the Santa Fe waiting offshore. Just a few minutes…

  Belzebub was just ahead, free of pursuit and heading toward the sea.

  A shrilling two tone alarm broke in. On the comm, Belzebub swore. “Shelby one-two, I have a SAM launch.” Somewhere down in those green hills was a man with a surface to air missile launcher, and Belzebub had just flown right over his head.

  “I see it.” And he did, launching almost on Belzebub’s tail, the missile’s path clear on his screens.

  “Taking evasive.” Belzebub pulled up sharply, almost standing his Phantom on its tail, racing for the skies. The missile matched his turn.

  “Right behind you.” George followed, feeling the g-forces in the pit of his stomach as his plane matched Belzebub’s move.

  “Releasing chaff,” Belzebub said.

  On the screen the missile didn’t veer. The alarm tone didn’t change. “You have no joy, Belzebub. Rep
eat, you have no joy.” George leveled out and then followed Belzebub into a roll so that the ground twisted beneath, jungle giving way to a flash of white beach. And then they were over the ocean climbing toward the thin scrim of cloud above. Mach 2, Mach 2.1, and still the missile stuck. It was closing. It had a slight edge, and it was gaining on Belzebub fast.

  Every movement seemed to take forever, as though the world had shifted into slow motion. Any second now it was going to hit. Belzebub’s life was measured in heartbeats. He had a wife and baby at home, people who needed him. And his life wasn’t charmed.

  Like mine is. Certainty surged through George, the sudden, startling clarity of belief. He was going to be a general. He was going to live thirty years. And he wouldn’t die today, and neither would Belzebub, not if he made the universe choose.

  “Turn to 240,” George said. “Now!”

  It would be a stupid, foolish move for Belzebub normally, bringing him closer to the SAM, not further away, but he trusted George. He did it.

  “Frank, drop our chaff!” George pulled up, passing over the turning missile with scant meters to spare, their chaff falling almost on top of it, a wave of light aluminum foil meant to confuse the guidance systems and convince them to acquire a fake target.

  It did. It thought it had made contact, and it blew.

  For a moment the world went light and then dark. His eyes couldn’t keep up with the sudden, searing light. Light and dark, light and dark, light and dark… George felt his head hit the canopy, his ears ringing.

  Light. Dark. Light. Dark. He tried to fight his way back to consciousness. Someone was yelling something. Someone was yelling.

  “Damn it George! You foolhardy SOB!” It was Belzebub — Jake. He was yelling in the comm. He was ok.

  Light. Dark. He opened his eyes, feeling his eyelids like lead. They were in a flat spin plunging toward the sea. Every alarm was sounding, every light red. Shrapnel had ripped through flight surfaces, engines and fuel lines.

  “Frank?” His gunner. What about Frank? “Frank?”

  He could hear Belzebub on the comm. “Paper Doll, I have a chute. Repeat, I have one chute. George! George, do you hear me?”

  One chute. That meant Frank had punched out. It was just him, unconscious for seconds in his shredded plane, the ocean coming up with alarming speed.

  “George! Do you hear me?”

  He could move his hand. He could move it. The release lever was right there. He closed his fingers around it.

  The force of the ejection knocked every other thought from his mind, 7 g’s right there, the thrusters beneath his seat blowing him clear of the falling plane. He could only close his eyes and grit his teeth, up and then tumbling wildly for a moment. And then the sudden catch. His parachute had opened.

  George looked up. It spread red and white against the sky. The wind dragged all other sound away.

  Below, the sea was deep blue, almost unreal looking. The sea. It was better to bail out over the ocean than over land. Less chance of capture by the Viet Cong. And there was the Santa Fe. It couldn’t be that far away. Surely it wasn’t.

  Now the waves had crests, slight touches of foam at their tops. A few hundred feet. Blue. So very blue. His feet skimmed, the drag pulling him down, and then he plunged in belly first, the parachute collapsing around him. He got a mouth full of seawater. Hold your breath. Release the chute. Befuddled, weighted down by the cloth, weighted down by waterlogged boots and flight suit, he was sinking. Sinking. Pulling him down…

  He was not going to die today. The young woman’s face swam before his eyes in the back of the truck. “General Hammond gave me a note and told me to keep it in my vest pocket.” Samantha Carter. “General Hammond gave me a note.” “General Hammond.” He couldn’t die. He had a date with the future.

  And then he was bobbing up, the light on the surface of the sea above like a windowpane. He broke through it, gasping in the air. His life vest had inflated. No, he’d inflated it. He’d done it in what might have been literally his last breath.

  But no. Here was one breath, and here another. He got his helmet off, cracked visor and all, and laid his head back on the breast of the ocean. Breathe. Breathe. The life vest held him up.

  Above, something silver turned against the distant haze of cloud, against the blue, blue sky. It left a vapor trail.

  His radio. His beacon.

  “…Paper Doll, I have a chute in the water but no movement. Coming around for another pass…” It was Belzebub’s voice, stressed and far too fast, though he always talked fast by George’s lights. “Lone Star. Lone Star. Shelby one-two. Do you copy?”

  The plane was turning, preparing to sweep over just to his right at a thousand feet. George lifted an arm and waved. He didn’t know if the motion could be seen. His beacon. He should turn it on. It shrieked on the radio frequency.

  “Paper Doll, I have a beacon!” Belzebub sounded triumphant. The plane’s jet wash sent a shiver across the waves around George. “He’s waving! George, can you hear me? Do you copy?”

  Transmit. Yes. “Roger that,” George said. His voice sounded shaky even to him. “I think I hit my head pretty hard. But I’m with you.”

  “Paper Doll is coming your way. ETA is about… seven minutes.” Belzebub was coming around for another pass, a long turn radius out of his sight. “Can you hang on?”

  “I’ve got to, don’t I?” George said. “Unless you’re planning to beam me up.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” Belzebub replied. “I left my starship at home.”

  “Then I’m hanging on.” George made himself relax. No point in wasting his strength fighting the waves. The ship — the Santa Fe — would be here soon.

  “I’m going to be right here, buddy,” Belzebub said. “You keep talking to me. You said you’ve got a head injury. So you stay with me and keep talking. Paper Doll is on the way.” The other Phantom swept over again.

  “What about Frank?”

  “He’s about two miles on from you,” Belzebub said. “He’s in a life raft and he’s not injured. He’s good to hang on while Paper Doll gets you first.”

  “You sure?” It all seemed strangely unreal. A head injury. Right.

  “He’s sure,” Belzebub said. “I’ve got him in sight on every pass and I’ve got him on the radio too. Frank’s fine. We’re going to get you first. So just keep talking to me.”

  “I’m talking,” George said. It would be so easy to go to sleep. But that was a bad idea.

  “You’re crazy, you know that? That’s the craziest maneuver I ever saw.”

  “It worked.”

  “You took the hit instead of me.” Belzebub’s voice almost choked.

  “You’ve got a wife and a little girl.” He could just lie back on the waves. The Santa Fe would be here soon. Just stay conscious. “You’ve got to get home to them.”

  “You’re getting home too, buddy. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, Jake.” Waves cresting. Washing almost over him. Ride them up and down. Stay conscious.

  “You think you can’t die or something?”

  George laughed. It sounded weird even to him, but then everybody would put it down to a head injury. “I know I can’t die. I’m going to be a general.”

  “You sure are.” Belzebub’s voice was calm. “You just hang in there. Paper Doll’s launching a boat. They’ll be there in two minutes. And I’m right here. Talk to me.”

  “Do you believe in time travel?”

  “No. And I don’t believe in UFOs either. Or little gray men from Outer Space.”

  And there was something orange, the boat coming toward him, a sailor with a line in the prow.

  “You should,” George said. “I’m going to be a general.” And darkness took him.

  It was a
long convalescence stateside. While George was in the hospital two amazing things happened. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving the lives of Captain Jacob Carter and his gunner, and he met Mary Anne.

  Mary Anne was a physical therapist, and the moment he saw her he was smitten. Red hair and freckles, a no-nonsense manner that belied her years — he would have asked her out but he was too shy. Besides, if he did she’d say no and he’d be assigned to another physical therapist and he’d never see her again. So he didn’t, not until the last day.

  Mary Anne looked at him sideways, mascaraed eyelashes too dark for her hair, and gave him a knowing smile. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

  They were married on June 4, 1972. Jennifer was born in August of ’73 and Emily in May of ’76, but by then they were in Germany. Emily was born at Rhine-Main, and she had a Steiff giraffe the size of a small pony that Jacob Carter sent with a note full of good wishes. He had a little boy now to go with his daughter, and he was at Edwards AFB in California. Jacob was headed for the top.

  George wasn’t. He never did get back into tactical aircraft. That was a fast track, and once you stepped off it you’d never get back on. Every up and coming kid was dreaming of being a fighter jock. You only got one shot at it. He’d been sidelined by a head injury and it was more than a year before he was cleared to fly again. By then it was a moot point.

  He made a fine Executive Officer. He was steady, organized, and good with people. He was adept at handling the intra-personal aspects of a squadron, with keeping everything running smoothly on the flight line and everywhere else. He was a competent guy, a stable guy. He wasn’t drinking and running around and showboating. You could trust George Hammond.