by Karen Miller
“John, no,” she whispered. “They are no different to us.”
The figures weren’t moving. For the moment, they seemed content to stand where they were, watchful and still, their essence flying from them in perpetual ribbons. Sheppard kept the gun up, but took his finger off the trigger. “What are they?”
“Travelers,” she told him. “Like us, perhaps. But they can no longer remember themselves.”
“We still can,” said Ronon. “Not sure for how long, though.”
He held up his hand. The tips of his fingers streamed like black smoke.
Beyond him, the sea was changing.
Sheppard walked past Dex, to the rail. He could see threads of light under the black water, shifting and sliding over each other as they rose to the surface. And in the far distance, the horizon was boiling upwards, silent and slow, curling upwards in every direction.
Far above him, the stars were going out.
He sighed. “We never left, did we?”
Ronon chuckled. “We were never there.”
“This isn’t us. This is a dream of us.” Teyla was standing next to him, watching the world grow facets and channels.
“So who’s dreaming us? Rodney’s wormhole entity?”
“That was not Rodney.” The horizon was gone, now, curling up over their heads, and the sea was a seething mass of polyhedra. “The entity cannot comprehend us. It is too big, too different.”
Sheppard nodded. Suddenly, the holes in his memory made sense. There were things he could not remember clearly because they had never happened. “It’s been trying to talk to us, though. The whole time. Using our own memories.”
Teyla touched his hand. “All it has is what we brought with us.”
“Talking to us, interrogating us…” Ronon shrugged. “It hasn’t been making a lot of sense.”
“Yeah,” Sheppard sighed. “Yeah, it has.”
“It had to be here,” said Sheppard, gazing up at the rippling, mirrored disk at the heart of the Stargate. “It couldn’t be anyplace else.”
“You’re using some pretty relative terms,” said McKay, his voice a sharp crackle in Sheppard’s headset. “Try to stop thinking about physical locations.”
“Try to shut up,” growled Dex. He was glaring at the three shadow creatures. They were standing at the base of the Stargate, in postures that spoke of wonder, or possibly terror. “So do we know what it wants, yet?”
“I think so,” said Sheppard. “I got asked the same question so many times I stopped hearing it.”
“How we got here?”
“Ah, you’re not actually-“
“Shut up.”
“The way in is the way out,” Teyla said quietly. “The entity is as trapped as we are.”
“And the way in is the one thing we’ve all been doing our best not to remember.” Sheppard’s left arm was streaming smoke, now; not black, but crimson. Another mystery he lacked the energy to solve. “I’m guessing it wasn’t fun.”
“That is what it needs from us. From all of us.” Teyla stepped towards the shadows. “They resisted remembering for so long that they lost everything.”
“Or maybe their memories weren’t enough.” The event horizon was in turmoil, its metal surface leaping and boiling. “I’ve seen its brain, kind of. Maybe it needed more than three people’s memories to find the way.”
“So what do we do now?” Dex had his arms folded defensively. “Draw it a map?”
Teyla shook her head. “I think this is enough.”
The walls were darkening, the metal panels flattening out, threads of gray light weaving across them in fractal branches like mercury injected into a vein. Sheppard could see the spaces between the branches twisting, turning over, growing more sides than they could possibly sustain.
The sight made his eyes ache. “Should have known that wasn’t really McKay,” he said to Teyla. “He’d have yelled at me for getting fingerprints on his screen.”
“We must have remembered him wrong.” She smiled sadly. “Perhaps he will be more like Rodney next time.”
He stared at her. “Wait, next time? What do you mean, next time?”
There was no answer. She was already beyond speech.
The room was unfolding, its surfaces sliding over and through each other in impossible patterns. The air was dislocating into razored shards. Sheppard looked wildly around, trying to fight down a rising panic, but the motion set his vision spilling wildly. For a sickening instant he was seeing through the wrong eyes, watching himself tessellate.
Then he was seeing through all their eyes at once.
Then sight was gone, and there was only the pressure in his head, folding the very stuff of him over and over into a singularity, an infinitesimal point of unimaginable pain and terror, flung headlong into the rushing, dimensionless dark…
It was late, and the infirmary was very quiet.
Atlantis was enjoying a period of relative calm. Off-world missions had been suspended while the Stargate’s systems were being tested, and as a result the number of medical emergencies had dropped to zero. For days now there had been no fevers to soothe, no burns to salve or wounds to close. Only the isolation room remained active, and activity there was being kept to a minimum for the benefit of its only patient.
The trauma staff were on standby. The beds were empty, the blades and needles tidied away. The lights had been dimmed. The only sounds John Sheppard could hear were the whisper of the air system, the soft click and hum of sleeping machinery, and the hurried yammering of his own heart.
He had been standing at the door of the observation deck for almost a minute now. Had the infirmary been fully staffed, no doubt he would have been asked why, but he wasn’t sure he could have given any kind of sensible answer.
And yet, passing his hand over the wall panel was far harder than it should have been.
The door whirred aside. Sheppard stepped through and began to make his way up the steps, carefully, his good hand on the rail. He was still unsteady on his feet, shivery and unbalanced, and he could not risk a fall.
The deck itself was in darkness. Sheppard peered around the corner, and saw a slim figure standing at the rail, forehead resting against the thick cold glass of the window.
“Colonel,” he said quietly.
Carter straightened, turned. “Wow. You look really bad.”
“Ah, thanks?”
She frowned. “I mean it, John. Shouldn’t you be resting?”
He shook his head, regretting it instantly. His skull felt heavy, but oddly delicate, as though cast from wet plaster. “Trust me, rest is the last thing I need.”
“If you say so.” She nodded at his chest. “How’s the arm?”
He followed her gaze, to the pressure sling binding his left arm tight to his body. And a memory, sudden and clear; the ravine edge giving way under him, boots sliding wildly on wet rock, an ill-advised grab at the dark space between two tilting boulders. The wet creaking snap of bone.
His gut lurched at the thought of it, and he looked up, away from the sling and back to the window. “On the mend. Is it time?”
“Yeah, almost.” She checked her watch, and sighed. “Eight-hour cycle, more or less. Keller’s still trying to find out why.”
Sheppard stepped up to the rail. “How long is she lucid for?”
“It varies, depending on what she’s asked, but never more than a few minutes. I guess there are specific triggers that put her back under, but we’re still learning what they are.”
“And this is cycle number…?”
“Nineteen.”
“Damn.”
Below him, lying still and silent under a silvery thermal blanket, was a young woman. She was pale, her face as white and immobile as paper, her expos
ed arms heavy with drip feeds and bio sensors and complex, twisting tattoos. Her hair was a strange color, bluish-blonde, and braided through with what looked like glass beads. In the darkness of the isolation room, among the shadows and the chrome and the flat blue glow of the monitors she looked ethereal, ghostly, impossibly delicate.
“Do you recognize her?” Carter asked him.
“Never seen her before, sorry.”
“It was a long shot. Ronon and Teyla said the same thing.” She folded her arms, tightly against herself. “I was hoping maybe she’d been on the planet with you. That if you saw her again…”
“Sam, there was no-one on the planet with us. The whole mission was a bust.” Had the young woman’s eyelids fluttered? The isolation room was too dark, he couldn’t be sure. “We wandered around in the rain for two hours looking for that weapons cache, then I fell down a hole and we came home. If there was anyone living there, we sure didn’t meet them.”
“The three of you went into the gate together.”
“Yeah.”
“And six people came out.”
Sheppard gripped the safety rail with his one good hand. Its solidity was a comfort. “So they tell me.”
He couldn’t remember returning to Atlantis after M3L-628. If he had ever formed memories of that time, they were lost to him, hidden away between walls of neural trauma. But he had read the reports, seen the security footage. He had watched himself slump bonelessly out of the event horizon, Teyla falling at his side, Ronon Dex taking two entirely unconscious steps before he, too, crumpled.
And a moment later, three more figures spilled out.
He hadn’t been able to watch what happened next, not for long. Perhaps, had he been feeling stronger, not so disorientated and fragile, the sight wouldn’t have affected him so badly. After all, he had witnessed horrors before, of a thousand different hues. But to see the newcomers wracked with convulsions, to hear their shrieks, watch them claw at their own eyes… It was too much. He had turned away from the screen, and not looked back.
Two of them, the older man and woman, had died there on the gate room floor. Only the girl down in the isolation room, sitting up now with her white face a mask of confusion and pain, had lived.
It was possible that the others had been her parents, but no-one could be sure.
“I’ve tried to remember what happened,” he said quietly. “Believe me, I’ve tried. After I came to in the infirmary, that’s pretty much all I did, but I got nothing except a blinding headache.” He shrugged, lopsidedly. “There’s a feeling, that’s all… Like I was somewhere else. For a long time.”
“According to McKay, just over a second and a half.” Below them, a figure was sitting down next to the girl, bulky in a crimson hazmat suit. Keller, reaching out to a put a gloved hand on the newcomer’s arm. “He keeps talking about a detour, as if you were snatched out of the wormhole, or met something already in it…” Carter shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Probably doesn’t to him, to be honest.”
“If anyone knows,” Sheppard muttered, “it’s her. But she can’t tell us a thing.”
“She told us her name.”
“She has?”
“Nineteen times. She told us she’s called John Sheppard.” Carter sighed. “I don’t think any of her own memories survived. Anything she once was is buried under layers of you, Ronon, Teyla…”
Sheppard didn’t speak. The girl was looking up at him, calmer now, and in response he raised his good hand in a pathetic half-wave. But even from this distance, in the dark, he could tell that she was already slipping away.
Maybe it was better, he thought despairingly, if none of them remembered. If McKay was right, he had been gone for less than two seconds, and it felt like he’d been tortured a month.
Had the newcomers already been there, suspended in McKay’s detour?
And if so, for how long?
The thought pierced him. He dropped his hand, stepped back from the rail. On the far side of the glass, Keller was shaking the girl’s arm, trying to get her attention.
“Hello? Can you tell me your name?”
Stargate SG-1
A Woman’s Army
Geonn Cannon
Being on time was five minutes late and, by her own rubric, Janet Fraiser was running twenty minutes behind schedule. She cursed the time-suck of changing elevators and the general slowness of the ride as she descended into the bowels of the base. She stepped through the doors as they opened and stopped in her office long enough to drop off her things and exchange her coat for a lab jacket. She found Lieutenant Evans and thanked her for filling in until she got there.
“It wasn’t a problem,” Evans responded. “Things weren’t too busy down here.”
Janet swept her gaze across the infirmary beds and only one that she could see was currently occupied. The unfortunate Sergeant Siler was getting his wrist wrapped in gauze. There was another bed hidden behind a closed curtain that probably held a patient, and she knew SG-4 was isolated in another area due to an unfortunate reaction to some local flora. “I’ll believe it when we see it. What have we got?”
Evans handed over her clipboard so Janet could examine the overnight reports. “Well, you saw…” She nodded toward Siler.
“Yes,” Janet said. “As long as he’s stable, I don’t need to know the details of his latest exploit.”
“All right then. Just the headlines. A medical team was just dispatched to the gate room a few minutes before you arrived. SG-9 was scheduled to come back ten minutes ago, so I assume it’s something to do with them. The members of SG-4 are responding well to the antibiotic you put them on. Hopefully we’ll be able to drop the quarantine tomorrow if they continue to progress.”
“Good work.” She let the papers fall and handed the clipboard back. “Has anyone on SG-4 started showing ill effects from the rash?”
“Nothing.”
“Fantastic. I’ll check on them myself when I have a few minutes.”
The medical team that responded to the gate activation returned with the two members of SG-9 propping their leader up between them. Janet caught the colonel’s eye and they shared a silent exchange. Colonel Greene shrugged apologetically. The woman was a former college athlete and constantly overexerting herself on missions. If it wasn’t a sprained wrist, it was a twisted ankle. She tried to be a superhero when it came to her team. Janet respected the intention but sooner or later she knew the colonel’s attempted heroics would lead to a much greater injury. She moved on an intercept course to give Greene a proper scolding when a strident voice stopped her in her tracks.
“Doc! There you are.”
Janet closed her eyes and dropped her head back at the thought of dealing with her most stubborn patient. She turned and stalked toward the man sprawled on one of her exam beds, one foot swinging over the edge of the mattress. He was at least laying down, which meant he probably wasn’t going to make a run for it, but she stood between him and the exit just in case. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and glared at him like a gunslinger getting ready for a shootout.
“Colonel O’Neill.” She spoke his name in an exasperated sigh.
“I come down here for a couple of aspirin, and your goons won’t let me leave.”
She kept her voice measured and calm. “I would apologize, but I’d have done the same thing if I’d been here. You are overdue for a checkup on that knee, and I don’t want to rush one before your next mission. If you just wait patiently we can get this over and done with so you can ignore your checkups for another six months.”
“You’re holding me hostage.”
“You want to see hostage?” Janet stepped forward. “Some of these beds have straps, you know.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me. You came down here for aspirin. That means your knee was hurting. I wouldn’t let you out of this bed now if Anubis himself landed on top of the mountain.”
Their standoff was interrupted by the arrival of Daniel Jackson. He stopped short next to Janet, looked between the two of them, and then took a step back. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Yes,” Janet said without taking her eyes off Jack. “But go ahead. I needed to check on Colonel Greene anyway. If Colonel O’Neill gets out of that bed, sound the alarm.”
He stopped her from walking away. “Oh. Actually I was looking for you.”
Janet broke off her staring contest. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. General Hammond wants you to sit in on a briefing with us.”
Jack sat up. “Us? Us being SG-1, us?”
Janet aimed a finger at him. “You. Stay.”
Jack pointed accusingly at Daniel. “He was dead six months ago. Why aren’t you bugging him for one of these checkups?”
“Because he actually shows up when we call for him,” Janet said. “We finally got you down here, and we are not letting you go unless the fate of the world is involved.”
“She’s right, Jack. Apparently Lieutenant Evans called General Hammond to let him know you were unavailable for the rest of the day. He said you could sit this one out.”
Jack looked hurt. “The hell you say.”
“It’s a purely diplomatic mission,” Daniel said.
Some of the fire went out of Jack’s eyes. “So… my options are…”
“You can sit around the infirmary being bored, but get your exams out of the way, or you can go be bored on an alien planet.” Daniel shrugged. “If you want to go, I’m sure General Hammond would be happy to —”
“No,” Jack interrupted. He sank back down onto the pillows. “No, you kids have fun.”
Daniel said, “I thought you might feel that way. Jack, be good and when it’s all over they’ll give you a lollipop.”
