Stargate SG-1 30 - Insurrection

by Sally Malcolm

  The sixth chevron engaged and Sam pulled back, moving around closer to the colonel’s position. The sand was running through the hourglass. Once SG-1 went through the gate, it was over. Her life—this iteration of her life—would be over.

  She didn’t relish the idea of facing oblivion alone, so she sought out the colonel.

  “Nice shooting, sir,” she said as she moved in closer to him. He still had his eye on the sky, but the glider hadn’t yet come around for another pass. His only reply was a tense nod; it was typical of the colonel that he’d find it easier not to acknowledge what was about to happen. And then, at last, the gate opened with its usual eruption of incandescent power and the event horizon burst out into the rainy night.

  “Carter, Daniel—now!”

  Sam didn’t watch. She kept her eyes on the shadows moving through the forest, her weapon firing at the tree line, covering SG-1’s escape. The colonel did the same, moving back to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her.

  “Teal’c,’ with me!” the other O’Neill barked.

  She could imagine them backing up together, up the three stone steps and into the gate. Her heart started to hammer, her gut twisting queasily. This was it, this was the end. It wasn’t like it was going to hurt; it wasn’t like she would feel anything. But everything would just stop. Oblivion.

  The end of her staff weapon began to shake and she felt the colonel’s hand on hers, pushing the weapon down.

  “They’ve gone,” he said, with a glance at the open Stargate. Its light still flooded the clearing, a few Jaffa running cursing from the trees.

  She and the colonel were safe, hidden by the rain and the night and the forest. And what did it matter anyway? Once the wormhole collapsed, once SG-1 was home, it would all disappear. Nonetheless, the colonel kept his hand on her arm and tugged her back further into the darkness of the rain-sodden trees.

  “So this is it, huh?” he said, drawing her attention away from the gate. Any moment now, it would close…

  Swallowing, she looked at him and nodded. “Yes sir.”

  She thought he might say something about it being an honor, about having no regrets: the usual valiant heroism. But instead he said, “We never did find that silver lining.”

  Sam gave half a smile. “No, I guess not.”

  He nodded, his gaze drifting away for a moment, toward the gate, and then back to her. “I think,” he said, “it might have looked something like this.” And he leaned down and kissed her through the rain.

  Sam closed her eyes, a hand on his shoulder, and waited for the gate to close, for everything to drift away.

  The wormhole died and…

  …there was still the steady hammering of rain through the trees, the bark of Jaffa curses.

  The colonel pulled away, looking back toward the Stargate. “Um,” he said, “everything was supposed to fade to black.”

  Sam shifted, uncomfortably. “Yes, sir.”

  “Well that’s… awkward.” He cleared his throat. “Didn’t it work?”

  “I—” It was difficult to think quite straight because his hand was still on her arm, but of course there was a notional explanation for the fact that they’d changed history and yet were somehow still around to witness it. “There’s a—It’s not a scientific theory, sir, but some people have postulated the existence of points of divergence within the timeline.”

  He took his hand from her arm, fingers flexing. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning that there are certain events in history that can unfold in multiple ways, each one giving rise to an alternate timeline.” She paused for a moment, feeling sick and heavy as the reality began to sink in. “I guess the quantum mirror should have clued me in. I mean, we know that multiple realities exist, I just didn’t imagine that we could create one…” Her throat closed as the magnitude of her failure hit home. “Sir,” she said, feeling her eyes fill, “I don’t think there was ever a way to unmake this timeline. We can’t save Janet; we never could. We can’t save any of them…”

  He was silent for a long beat, the rain pattering around them. “But the other team?” he said, nodding toward the gate. “They started a different timeline, right?”

  “I guess,” she said, swiping at her eyes. Not that it made much difference in the rain; her face was already wet.

  “One where we uncovered Maybourne’s mole in time to keep the whole shebang together.” He smiled, a bare glimpse of his teeth in the dark. “One where Fraiser lives to a hundred-and-five and has an army of grandkids to order around.”

  Sam nodded because she couldn’t quite find her voice; all of that was true, but it wasn’t her reality—that wasn’t this life. Overhead the glider made another pass, higher this time, as the Jaffa began a disconsolate retreat from the Stargate. Mission failure. She knew how they felt.

  “Question is,” the colonel said, “what do we do now?”

  There was a weight to the question and when she looked back at him she could see he was more doubtful than he sounded. He didn’t quite meet her eyes and she knew he was thinking of that other thing that had just happened between them. She shifted, awkward, and said, “I guess, we’re stuck in this reality, sir. So we should make the best of it.”

  “Okay,” he said, still regarding her warily. “Which means we really have to make the best of it, Carter. And I mean, fight for it—for Earth.”

  Doubtful, Sam shook her head. Ever since she’d stood in the wreckage of the SGC and figured out the dreadful truth about where they were and what had happened to Earth, she’d felt that the only way to fix the problem was to reboot. Without that option, it meant that the only home they had was the devastated ash-covered ball of rock she’d seen from the window of Hecate’s mother ship. A world where civilization had been reduced to rubble, where the last of its people cowered, hopeless, in filthy camps waiting to die at the hands of the Wraith. “Do you really think it’s possible?” she said. “Even if we could get rid of the Wraith and the Goa’uld, Earth has no way to defend itself—it has nothing.”

  “That’s not true,” the colonel said. “It’s got one thing going for it.”

  She cocked her head. “Which is?”

  “Us,” he said. “And it’s got people, Carter. Thousands of them. People like Aedan Trask and Elspeth Burne, like Hunter and the resistance. Maybe all they need is someone to lead them.”

  “And that’s us?”

  “If there’s no one else.” He shrugged. “Besides, I’d vote for Daniel as president of the world.”

  Sam laughed at that, a thin sound in the cold forest. “I guess we have to try, sir.”

  “Yeah,” he said, squaring his shoulders as if to take the load. “That’s all we can do, Carter. ‘Try’ is all we’ve ever done.”

  It was true enough, and mostly it worked out, but this was a whole new magnitude of saving the world. To distract from the enormity of the task ahead, Sam looked past it toward the unknowable future. “And what then, sir? Once we’ve saved Earth, what then?”

  There was a pause before the colonel answered. “Then,” he said, clapping her on the shoulder and urging her gently into motion, back toward the gate-ship, “maybe you’ll stop calling me ‘sir.’”

  Huffing out another shaky laugh, Sam nodded. “Yes sir. Maybe.”

  Arbella — 2098

  The atmosphere in the gate room was much changed from the last time Teal’c and Daniel Jackson had stood there. It was solemn—the news of Lana Jones’s death had spread rapidly, as had the truth of Karin Yuma’s part in it—but beneath the solemnity lay a thread of tension, a powder keg waiting for a match.

  Bailey could sense it too. Teal’c had noted as much from the way she had surveyed the streets when they left the president’s residence less than an hour before. Too much antagonism had been building over recent weeks and the general was waiting for it to come to a head. Teal’c admired her intuition while experiencing a certain level of guilt at the part SG-1 may have unwittingly played in fermenting
unrest, a guilt only heightened by the fact that they must now leave.

  “I’m sorry he refused to listen,” General Bailey was saying to Daniel.

  But Daniel only shook his head. “He’s just lost his wife in horrendous circumstances. I don’t think he’s in any frame of mind to listen to anyone.”

  From a compassionate perspective, Teal’c silently agreed; he couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Jones to have found out that his wife had been so close, only to be cruelly snatched away by someone he thought was his most trusted advisor. Officer Hayden’s account of events, at odds with his previous loyalty to Yuma, had been enough to convince the president that General Bailey’s version of events was true.

  The man hadn’t wept, but instead he had whispered to his guards, “Let them go,” before walking from the library without looking back.

  General Bailey had appeared distressed at leaving him, but there was nothing she could have done to spare him the pain; Teal’c knew that human grief could manifest itself in myriad ways.

  The military tactician in him, however, regretted the failure of their mission and could not help but wish that the death of his wife had spurred President Jones into action. Without the Arbellan forces to secure the Stargate on Earth, the Tau’ri’s chance of freeing Earth from the Wraith, and then defending it, was significantly weaker. Earth had no organized military force, nothing but the rag-tag human colonies fighting for their freedom. And, committed though they might be, Teal’c knew that they would not be enough.

  He also felt a great sense of foreboding whenever he remembered that it was to Hecate’s ship to which they must now return. Rya’c could give them all the reassurances he wanted, but Hecate was still a Goa’uld even if she did speak with Janet Fraiser’s voice.

  At the top of the steps, the wormhole erupted into life and they had already started towards it when Daniel Jackson stopped and faced General Bailey once more. “I know we have no right to ask this of you, but… keep the door open. Can you? If we need to return?”

  Bailey shrugged, a defeated gesture. “What else can we do to help you, Jackson? Nothing’s gone as we hoped. Yuma’s out there somewhere and we’re holding on to order by a very thin thread. I don’t know what’ll become of Arbella now.”

  “You’ll survive,” said Daniel, a calm certainty in his words. “It’s what we do. But we can’t do it without each other. So just… keep the door open?”

  With a grim smile Bailey nodded her silent promise. It was all that Teal’c and Daniel could take back with them.

  Chapter 13

  Earth — 2098

  Dawn broke the next morning just as it always had. Nothing had changed.

  Sting hadn’t understood why O’Neill had thought anything might be different, how the mission he had embarked upon could have wrought a change so fast, so he was not surprised to find the dawn unremarkable.

  However, it left him with a problem.

  Boneshard was contained, for now, in one of the few functioning cells upon Brightstar’s ailing hive. His strength was formidable and Sting had set two blades, plus Stormfire, to watch him; he did not trust the bars alone to hold him.

  Now, he must decide what to do with the abomination. O’Neill’s insistence that he should take it to Hecate, the parasite, was almost too ridiculous to consider. But if he had been right about her plan to destroy all Shadow’s Wraith, then perhaps…

  “You are troubled.” Earthborn spoke mind-to-mind as she approached him where he stood beyond the hive.

  Below, in the sprawl of the encampment, the humans continued their small struggles to live beneath Shadow’s fist. Never before had Sting felt anything beyond contempt for those who cowered here, but his perspective had changed—as his queen well knew. “There is much to question.”

  “This place makes it so,” she said. “But we are what we are. That cannot change.”

  “But what we are—”

  The air around them shifted suddenly, an uplift of dust and grit as if a dart was landing. No dart appeared, but there was noise, the definite hum of engines.

  Putting Earthborn behind him, Sting ducked his head away from the gritty air. “Go inside!” he ordered. “Send Hearten to—”

  Her hand tightened on his arm. “Look.”

  He turned, taking a step back in surprise as the Lantean ship appeared as if out of thin air before them. Its hull was damaged, as if it had seen battle, and through its window he could see O’Neill and Carter. O’Neill gave a wave, apparently pleased with his dramatic entrance.

  “So—they have returned,” Earthborn said, her hand still firm on his arm.

  The back of the gate-ship opened, spilling out light along with its human passengers. O’Neill came first, Carter on his heels. Their clothing was damp, as if they’d spent long hours in heavy rain. It gave Sting no real clue as to the nature of their mission.

  “Did your mission succeed?” he said, walking around to meet them at the foot of the ramp.

  “Depends on what you mean by succeed,” O’Neill said with an enigmatic smile. “But we took a little heat on the way back through the gate.” He glanced past Sting, toward Earthborn. “Courtesy of your sister’s people camped out at the Stargate.” It was inappropriate to address a queen so, but Sting had learned to expect such things from O’Neill—and to overlook them.

  Earthborn said, “Shadow holds the Stargate?”

  “For now.” O’Neill turned his quicksilver gaze on Sting. “You and O’Kane get the hybrid back okay?”

  “We did. Boneshard is being held within the hive.” He allowed himself a moment of amusement. “Stormfire is entertaining himself with him.”

  “I’m not sure who I feel most sorry for,” O’Neill said. Then he took a breath, as if steeling himself for some unpleasant task. “So I guess we need to decide what to do next.”

  Sting inclined his head. “Was not the plan to take the hybrid to the parasite-god?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s part of it…” His attention roved to Earthborn and then returned to Sting. “We, uh, we picked up a little intel,” he said. “That is, we’ve got good reason to think that Hecate is playing us.”

  “If you mean that she is deceiving you,” Sting said, “then that is hardly unexpected information. Her kind are nothing but deceptive.”

  O’Neill tipped his head, conceding the point. “Well, Carter and I were thinking we could do a little deceiving ourselves.”

  In his mind, Sting felt Earthborn urging him to caution. He did not need to be told. “In what manner?”

  “Hecate wants the hybrid. And maybe she wants it for the reason she told us, maybe she doesn’t. But I think we need to hedge our bets.”

  Sting blinked, waited for O’Neill to explain the vernacular.

  “I mean,” he said, “we cover our bases.”

  Another slow wait.

  Carter cleared her throat. “What he means,” she said, “is that we take matters into our own hands regarding Atlantis.” Her gaze travelled to O’Neill, her expression unhappy, and then returned to Sting. “Colonel O’Neill wants to go back there, with Earthborn, to take the city while you and I take the hybrid to Hecate. If we play along, maybe we can convince her to let Earthborn lead your people home—the ones who aren’t hybrids. It’s what we all want. Meanwhile, we’ll have an ace up our sleeve.” She pulled a face. “I mean, we have—”

  “—another string to our bow?” O’Neill suggested.

  She shot him a dry look. “We have Atlantis,” she said, returning her attention to Sting. “And if the colonel can fly it, then he can take on Hecate’s hive. And we’ll have the upper hand.”

  Sting’s instinctive rejection of the plan was silenced by Earthborn’s command made mind-to-mind. “Be still, my consort.” Out loud, she said, “Do you think it would be possible, O’Neill, for the two of us to take Atlantis?”

  He spread his hands in a gesture of bravado. “Sure, why not?”

  “It is filled with Shadow’s Wr
aith.”

  “Well, get me to the command center and the ship is mine.” He tapped his head. “I’ll leave winning hearts and minds to you.”

  “I will not let you go without me,” Sting said, before Earthborn could say more. And he cared not for the niceties of protocol. “It is too dangerous.”

  He felt her affront immediately, though it was softened by understanding. “I am still your queen,” she reminded him. “I do not require your permission.” Her hand touched his arm once more, too intimate for such a public place. “It is worth the risk to win everything that we desire, to take our people away from this place—to go home to the ancestral feeding grounds of Brightstar. Is it not?”

  Lifting his eyes to hers, Sting said, “No. Nothing is worth risking you.”

  Her mind radiated warmth, but when she spoke it was aloud. “That,” she said, “is not true.” Then, to O’Neill, “I will go with you.” Her arm tightened on Sting’s arm, forestalling his protest. “We will take two of my blades, Hearten and Flint, with us.”

  To this, Carter exchanged a look with O’Neill who, after a pause, said. “Fine—and I’ll take Daniel.”

  “They do not trust us,” Sting said.

  “That is reasonable,” Earthborn said aloud, in answer to both Sting and O’Neill. “When do we depart?”

  O’Neill made a show of stretching his back, opening his mouth in a yawn. “Carter and I need a couple hours shut-eye,” he said. “And then we’re good. Carter can send Daniel down when she reaches the Ha’tak and then we can go.”

  “Assuming he and Teal’c made it back from Arbella,” Carter said with a look of concern Sting noted.

  O’Neill’s expression remained closed. “They’ll be there.”

  Earthborn inclined her head. “Sunset, then,” she decided. “I will prepare.”

  Sting watched her leave, the imperious sway of her back, her chin held high. It pained him, this plan, and he turned to O’Neill with no small amount of irritation. “I do not like this.”