“That’s why I’m asking Colonel Carter,” Sheppard retorted.
“It’s possible,” Sam said, to Sheppard. “But – Dr. McKay does know what he’s doing.”
“I’ll talk to Zelenka, too,” Sheppard said, with a quick grin.
“Zelenka!” McKay’s voice scaled upward. “What does he know about subspatial theory that I don’t?”
“He has a lot more common sense,” Sheppard said. “Are you ready, Colonel? General O’Neill?”
“Are we, Carter?” Jack asked.
“Yes, sir.” She closed her laptop and handed it to McKay, who looked momentarily stricken.
“Maybe we should go over those calculations one more time,” he began, and Sam shook her head.
“We’re ready. And I think you and Major Sheppard should leave the chamber. Anything in here is going to get transported with us.”
For a moment, Daniel wished he could have spent more time with the Ancient database — if he hadn’t slept the night before, maybe, or if anyway he’d just stayed awake a little longer. There was so much here, so much that he hadn’t had time to skim, never mind study… But this wasn’t Atlantis, not his Atlantis, the Atlantis that was real to him. There was no guarantee that anything he learned here would be true in their version of the Pegasus Galaxy.
“Good luck, General, Colonel,” Sheppard said. “Gentlemen.”
“Thank you, Major,” Jack answered, and Sam echoed him.
McKay started to say something, advice or complaint, not from the tone of it good wishes, and Sheppard pushed him out the door. The door slid shut behind him.
“All right, kids,” Jack said. “Ready to go home?”
“Ready, sir.” Sam bent over the console. “I’m starting the system now.”
Daniel braced himself, but nothing happened. “Sam?”
“It’s working.” She eyed the console warily. “The connection is now open, and power is building.”
“Should we take up any particular position?” Teal’c asked.
“Besides duck and cover?” Jack asked. Teal’c gave him a questioning look, and Jack sighed. “Never mind.”
“Indeed.”
“We shouldn’t need to,” Sam said. “Everything in the room should go.” She looked at the console again. “Seventy-five percent.”
“The eyes are glowing,” Daniel said.
“Which is a good sign, right?” Jack said.
“Evidently,” Teal’c said.
“Eighty-five percent,” Sam said.
The ball of light formed, began to make its way around the snake’s body, glowing white-hot, bright enough to leave green trails across Daniel’s vision. Teal’c shaded his eyes, and Jack ducked his head a little, grimacing.
“Ninety percent,” Sam said. “Ninety-five, ninety-eight —”
Another flat crack, like lightning, and abruptly they were stumbling off the edge of the platform in an installation like the one they’d started from. Daniel tripped and went to his knees, hauled himself up to see only familiar faces. Bill Lee, Nick Perry, Joe Periera — they were back on P6T-847, and in their own proper time.
“You did it, Sam,” he said.
Jack nodded. “Nice work, Carter.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, and Teal’c nodded.
“Indeed.”
The nearest technicians were pulling back the door, and Lee shoved his way past to be first into the chamber. “General O’Neill! Colonel Carter! Thank God you’re all right. What happened?”
“We went on a little trip,” Jack said. “Apparently the — what did you call them, cut-outs? They didn’t work.”
“Well, um — no.” Lee ducked his head, visibly embarrassed.
“What happened on this end?” Sam asked.
“Well.” Lee blinked hard. “When the system wouldn’t shut down, and you ordered everyone out — there was a flash of light and you disappeared.”
“Did the ouroboros do anything?” Sam asked. “Say where we’d gone, anything like that?”
“Not that we’ve been able to find out,” Lee answered. “We were just starting to try to get some decent diagnostics when the snake’s eyes started to glow again. So we cleared the chamber and, bam! There you were. Back.”
“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “What do you mean, you were just starting to run diagnostics?”
“Well, first we wanted to be sure you weren’t going to just, you know, reappear,” Lee said. “And then we wanted to be sure we weren’t going to disturb any important settings.” He stopped, looking hurt. “You’ve only been gone about ten minutes, General.”
“Ten minutes,” Jack said, his voice flat. “Not to us, Dr. Lee.”
Sam said, “It’s kind of a long story.”
“Be that as it may,” Jack said, “we are not going to do any more fooling around with this thing until we have a lot better understanding of how and why we ended up in an alternate timeline. Got that?”
Lee looked as though he wanted to object, but he was quelled by Jack’s lifted eyebrow.
“We’re shutting this down now,” Jack said. “Carter, I want you to find that key crystal and remove it. I want to be very sure nobody else gets sent off to some random location. Once again, Janus’s stuff turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth.”
Daniel looked over his shoulder at the golden ouroboros set into the wall. It looked utterly innocuous, like some purely decorative object, and he shook his head. “Do you think this has any connection with what’s happening to our expedition? Have they had to abandon the city? Fight the Wraith?”
“We cannot know,” Teal’c said, and Daniel thought there was a note of sadness in his voice. “Perhaps they found Atlantis intact, or perhaps they were able to raise it —”
“Teal’c was right the first time,” Sam said. “There’s no way to know. Not until we can find some way to contact them.”
“But this isn’t it,” Jack said, and she sighed.
“No, sir. I’m afraid not.”
“We’ll find a way,” Jack said. “But for now — it’s time to go home.”
About The Author
Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program.
She is the author of more than twenty science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett.
She has also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Her most recent novel, Steel Blues, written with Jo Graham, was published by Crossroad Press in early 2013, and her next novel, Death By Silver, written with Amy Griswold, will be out from Lethe Press in the spring of 2013.
She can be found on LiveJournal at mescott.livejournal.com
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