“Hello again,” she muttered. She opened a channel and spoke at full voice. “This is Colonel Samantha Carter of the Earth vessel Hammond requesting a response from the unidentified vessel.” She paused, sucking her bottom lip as she scanned the empty air in front of her. “I don’t know if you can hear me, or if you understand me, or if this is even getting through. But you obviously stopped just short of destroying us so… Thank you for that. I assume my crew has been transported to your vessel. I’d like to begin negotiations to get them back.”
Silence.
“They’re not going to answer.”
Sam closed her eyes. “Oh, great…”
She turned slowly to see Rodney McKay looking at the front viewscreen as if he could see the alien vessel outside. His face was twisted in an expression of dismay that almost bordered on pain. Last time she’d encountered these beings, her head injury had caused her to hallucinate team members who weren’t actually present. This time, though she didn’t know what had rendered her unconscious, it seemed the modus operandi was the same.
“Hello, McKay. You’re probably right. So I’m going to head down to the 302 bay and see if any of the fighters are operational. They can’t get me back to Atlantis, but they’ll be better than just sitting here waiting for rescue. At the very least I might get out far enough that someone will find a distress signal. Maybe one of the Traveler’s ships will hear it, or —”
“The Mary Celeste,” McKay said as he trailed along behind her. “The USS Proteus in 1941… Uh, the Nereus a month later. All ghost ships. Airplanes, sailing ships, all going missing so often we have the Bermuda triangle myth. All this running around in space, all the ships we’ve thrown out into the cosmos, it was bound to happen. We were bound to have a ghost spaceship eventually. I always figured I would be on board when it happened. And oh, look. Here I am.”
“The Mary Celeste was found, but her crew was missing.” Sam didn’t focus on the fact that she was currently the only crewmember whose whereabouts were known. “And the other ships were victims of extenuating circumstances. You said it yourself, the Bermuda triangle is a myth.”
McKay said, “Yes, extenuating circumstances. Like a giant ship that just knocked out the most advanced ship in our fleet like it was a Big Wheel? We are completely hooped!”
She grimaced. “Why do you always have to be such a doomsayer?”
“I point out the worst-case scenario. That has value. Especially when everyone is looking to me for some kind of miracle. You don’t know the kind of pressure that comes with that expectation.”
Sam snorted and rolled her eyes. “You do realize who you’re talking to, right? ‘Sam will figure it out. Sam blew up a sun. Sam can learn an alien culture’s complete language and technology in five minutes and fix things.’”
“Do you realize who you’re talking to?” McKay said. “I’m not even here right now. This is just… I don’t know what this is.”
Sam had to admit she was a little confused by that as well. “Last time I thought I was suffering a head injury. I assumed I was just talking to myself, hallucinating the people closest to me so I could work through the situation.”
McKay straightened his shoulders and preened a bit. “The people closest to you, eh?”
She glared at him as she accessed the lift to descend to the 302 bay. “But that’s obviously not the case this time. The aliens have copied their previous behavior down to the last detail — disabling the ship, taking the crew, leaving me behind. The only question is why.”
“Interrogation.”
Ronon spoke from her left side. He was staring straight ahead, arms crossed, expression frozen as it tended to be when he was trying to work something through in his head. A quick scan of the lift revealed McKay had vanished. She had a feeling that Ronon had never really warmed to her, but she was still glad to see he was part of whatever was going on in her head. McKay did have his value, but Ronon was a warrior. Sometimes a situation needed a strong arm more than a quick mind.
“You think they took the crew to interrogate them?”
“No. Well… maybe. I think they’re interrogating you. Maybe everyone else is still on the ship and you were the only one taken. Or you were all taken, and right now you’re all seeing the same thing: yourselves, alone on the vessel, trying to figure out how to get home. And whoever took you is watching to see what you do.”
Sam smiled. “Teal’c said the same thing last time.”
“Did he?” It didn’t really sound like a question, just a mere acknowledgment of what she’d said.
Sam thought for a moment about the possibility that he was right, but it didn’t strike her as plausible. “No. I don’t think that’s the case. Last time I came up with the solution to free us from a gas cloud, and they needed me to implement it to free them.”
“Gas cloud?”
“Yes. I suggested we take cover inside the cloud hoping the alien ship wouldn’t follow us inside. I was wrong. Fortunately, we both ended up trapped inside of it.”
Ronon said, “So the cloud is why the aliens didn’t destroy your ship last time. You got them out and they felt obligated to you.”
“Maybe.”
“Makes you wonder what stopped them from taking you all the way out this time.”
The elevator arrived at its destination and Sam stepped out of the lift. Directly ahead of her she saw a blonde woman, about her height, wearing the flight suit of a crew member. Even from a distance Sam could see the patch wasn’t the Hammond’s. She stepped closer and the woman’s features came into focus as she began to speak.
“Major Erin Gant, United States Air Force. Currently assigned to the Prometheus. This is my record of the events that occurred on January 16, 2004. To the best of my knowledge, sir.”
“I’m sure it will be fine, Major,” General Hammond said.
Sam remembered Gant’s fidgeting as she tried to remember anything from the alien ship that might be helpful. “Colonel Ronson sounded the evacuation, so we got to the escape pods and jettisoned out. Unfortunately the cloud we’d taken refuge in affected them the same way it had Prometheus. Our engines died and the alien vessel scanned us. After that… we were back on the bridge. I could tell time had passed but I didn’t remember anything that happened in between the two events.”
“That’s what you said in your initial report. In the time since, have you remembered anything else?”
Gant brought her hand up to her mouth and chewed on her thumbnail. She and the rest of the crew had been the prisoners of an unknown race that had managed to disable the ship with no effort whatsoever. All of them claimed to have no memory of their captivity. Even though they had been returned unharmed, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the possibilities. Sam had spent a good portion of the return trip questioning her own sanity, lying in the infirmary and trying to determine if the visitations had been simple figments of her imagination, interference from the aliens, or something else altogether.
She hadn’t come up with an answer then but it seemed like she might get a second chance at finding out the truth. She let the memory of Gant’s interrogation fade but she held on to the memory of General Hammond a moment longer than everything else. The news of his death had come as a shock to everyone. She hadn’t had the opportunity to process the loss before the Wraith showed up and threatened the planet, but these long slogs between Earth and Atlantis gave her plenty of time to think about life without General Hammond.
As if he was cued by her thoughts of him, the image or ghost or whatever it was turned to look at her. “Hello, Sam. You’ve come a long way from Jacob’s backyard, haven’t you? Did they get this ship right?”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. “I made sure of it.”
Hammond chuckled.
“I wish you could have been here to see it, sir. I made sure it was gi
ven an appropriate name: the George Hammond.”
“I’m honored. Although I’m surprised that you didn’t name it after your father.”
Sam smiled. “Commanding a ship named after my father? Even with hazard pay I couldn’t afford all the therapy that would require. Besides, dad was a soldier in the war against the Goa’uld, just like I was, and he served under your command. We all did.” She realized she still didn’t understand what was happening, or what these visions really meant, but she’d spent the months since Hammond’s death thinking about all the things she hadn’t had a chance to say. Now she it felt like she had the opportunity to make up for that error.
“Sir, I didn’t request the name because I’d known you for so long, or because of what you meant to me. I requested it because, without you, there would be no Daedalus-class warships. There would be no Atlantis, no Stargate program to speak of. You kept it afloat, you kept us safe, and you let us do what needed to be done. When you died, I thought… No, I knew. I knew that you had to remain part of the program going forward, even if it was just in spirit.”
“I only gave you room to do what you did best.”
“You gave me the confidence to do my best, sir. Now…” She looked around. “I don’t know if I’m up to this challenge.”
Hammond dropped his head and his shoulders shook with a quick chuckle. When he looked at her again he wore that reassuring smile that had gotten her through so many trials. “Sam, I don’t think you’ve ever seen a challenge you didn’t overcome. And if Plan A doesn’t work, then you’ll have a Plan B waiting.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll do fine, Sam. You never do anything else.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She reluctantly left him and continued on her journey. She couldn’t spend any more time trying to remember bits and pieces of the past incident. Even if there was something useful in Major Gant’s testimony that she couldn’t remember, her current situation took precedence. If there was something to be found in the memory, her subconscious would keep chipping away at it while her body did more practical things. She continued on past the hallucination of Hammond and entered the hangar.
The 302s seemed intact, and she approached the nearest one as McKay entered the hangar behind her. “Why are you wasting your time up here? If the aliens are capable of disabling your entire ship and grabbing the crew, why would they leave you with ships capable of escaping? And, even if they were operational, it’s not going to do you any good. The range on these things? They’ll never get you all the way back to Atlantis.”
“I can’t just ignore the possibility of a working ship, Rodney. If they’ll fly, I could use one to confront the alien vessel. I could force them to respond to my attempts at communication.”
“Oh, brilliant plan, Colonel Kamikaze. Just fly up and slam yourself into the side of a ship the size of Australia. I’m sure that’ll teach them a lesson.”
“Yes, compared to them I’d be an ant. But a strategically placed ant can ruin a picnic.”
McKay crossed his arms over his chest, huffy. “Okay, well, what if you poke them and they just ignore you?”
“Then I find the nearest planet with a Stargate. Or I intercept the Intergalactic Gate Bridge. The station is gone, but I can use the dialer in one of the ships to head home and deliver a report.”
“You’d leave your team behind?”
“If it was necessary to gather a big enough force to get them back, absolutely.” She climbed onto the side of the ship, opened the cockpit, and settled into the seat to check the instrument panels. Rodney might be a manifestation of her pessimism, but she refused to let herself be discouraged when the engines proved unresponsive. “And if the engines are down, I can try sending a distress signal…”
“But communications are down too, right?” McKay said.
She shook her head and hauled herself out of the cockpit. “Failure is just the elimination of one possibility. And whether this is me sorting through my own mental processes, or an alien attempt to probe my reactions, I’ll still get useful answers to whatever questions I ask. I just have to decide if getting the knowledge is worthwhile if I’m potentially sharing it with the interrogator. Checking every option also provides me with information about the enemy.”
“Like what?”
“Like now I know they managed to disable the 302s. That’s an impressive feat. I’d like to know how it was done.”
McKay’s expression changed as she climbed down, his features twisting into a mixture of revelation and dread. “Oh. Oh, no. Maybe they didn’t have to do anything to the ship at all. Maybe the 302s are perfectly fine. Maybe the Hammond is perfectly fine. If they’re making you see me, then who knows what else they can make you see?”
“You’re not helping. Follow me if you’re coming.”
He turned on the ball of his foot to follow as she walked past him.
“If you have to be here, you could be a little more help. You’re just going around and around in circles. Last time this happened, SG-1 helped me figure out a solution.”
“Actually, they presented conflicting theories that you eventually had to tune out in order to solve the problem.”
Sam sighed. “Right. I had to learn to listen to myself. The aliens are putting together a morality play just for me.” She turned a corner and stopped in her tracks.
Standing between her and the lift was Lieutenant Samantha Carter. Green, naïve, and so eager to please that she snapped off a salute before she realized the commanding officer in front of her shared her face. Sam blinked at Lieutenant Carter, who slowly dropped her hand.
“Wow.”
“This isn’t real,” Sam said. “So it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t it?” McKay said. “This is the little girl who dreamt of visiting the moon, whose only ambition was to fly on a rocket ship to outer space. It was what she worked her entire childhood for, and then… boom. Challenger. The carpet was ripped out from underneath her feet. She took a job that would get her as close as she could get to her dream, but it wasn’t the same. She worked in an office at the Pentagon. Hardly the life she’d imagined. Look at her! The word Stargate doesn’t mean anything to her. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, this young Carter. So fresh and full of life. Vital. Supple…”
Sam glared at him. “Getting creepy, McKay.”
He cleared his throat. “Right. Sorry. The point is, you never gave up. Even when the fleet was grounded you swore you would get up there someday. And now look at you.”
“The Amelia Earhart of the SGC?” She stepped around her past self and continued on.
The corridors of the ship were ominous when empty, dimly-lit, and running on the bare minimum of emergency power. She returned to the bridge and checked to see if the alien ship had done anything. While her attention was on the screen, someone stepped around in front of the station to look out the viewscreen. She didn’t have to look up to know who it was; she knew him by his gait and the way he folded his arms as he craned his neck in an attempt to lean out far enough to see the enemy ship.
“Any ideas, Colonel Sheppard?”
“A few. They’re acting strangely, don’t you think?”
Sam considered the question. “How so?”
“Well, look at your last encounter with them. The Prometheus was just sitting there, no engines to speak of, a fraction of their size, and they ran up and started pounding on you with everything they had. They knocked out your shields, they blew up your missiles before they could explode harmlessly against their shield. You didn’t stand a chance against them. Then you ran away, and they chased you.”
Sam nodded. “Right.”
“But they didn’t have to chase you this time. There’s no cloud that you’re both stuck in. So why did they stop? Why are they just sitting here now?”
“You hav
e a point.”
“Maybe they want you to surrender.”
“They obviously don’t,” Sam said. “They refused to respond when I opened a channel.”
Sheppard shrugged. “Maybe they don’t communicate in a way we recognize. Maybe they think you’re the one refusing to respond to their messages.”
Sam closed her eyes and pressed her thumb against the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re a civilized race.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The ship!” Sam said. “Any race that reaches these technological heights has to be doing something right.”
Sheppard said, “What about the Wraith? What about the Ori? Just being advanced doesn’t mean you’re immune from being a jerk.”
“But they proved their true nature last time. We made a deal and they followed through on it. They gave back the crew and left without attacking us any further because I helped them out of the cloud. And that proves they’re capable of understanding me because they were able to make the deal in the first place.”
Sheppard nodded. “Okay. So they’re capable of listening to reason.”
“But their behavior doesn’t fit. They walked up, punched us in the face, and then listened to reason? They chased us into a cloud they must have at least suspected would affect their ship. Why would they be so aggressive and then simply back off?”
“Maybe the aggression had a different purpose. They stopped short of destroying you when they could have done it easily.”
None of it added up. She laced her fingers on the back of her neck and stretched.
“I don’t know why you’re trying to figure this all out by yourself,” McKay said.
She stifled a groan of frustration.
“It’s a pointless exercise when you have access to my vastly superior brain. Of course, if this is just a projection of your own thought process, then it will be a poor substitute for the real thing…”
Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis - Far Horizons Page 26
