Slipping the device over her hand, Sam nodded. The jewel on the cuff immediately began to glow. “I think it would be wiser to make time jumps between the same physical 'gates.”
“And remember—”
Sam moved the laptop and stood. Taking in a deep breath, she embraced him and said, “Three Finger Brown.”
“And this timeline will cease exist,” Teal'c said.
Cam turned to him and with a voice tired beyond measure, replied, “Teal'c, there aren't words to describe how much I'm looking forward to that.”
“Just say, for instance, something else goes wrong and we don't make it back, or this timeline keeps going.” Jack turned and met Sam's glare. “I'm just pointing out what you said earlier.”
“Thought about that,” Cam replied, “and what you said to me in the Park, Teal'c. I don't think it'll take a hell of a lot of convincing to get them to bury the Stargate. The capstones are at the museum.”
“Someone could open it again, Cam,” Daniel warned, glancing at Bennett.
“Someone did, as I recall.” A grin briefly crossed Cam's face as he met Daniel's eyes. “And figured out how to use it. It's like I said, I've set things up on several planets for people and Jaffa—to take care of themselves. Everyone on Earth knows about the 'gate, and they've experienced a taste of what's out there.”
He glanced at Bennett, and Sam briefly explained how he'd come to team up with them, then shook his hand and said, “Thanks for everything.”
Bennett met each of their eyes in turn, then settled on Sam's. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“Well, son,” Cam said to him, “if you and I are still here when these guys reset the clock, you're about to begin a new career as the negotiator for an interplanetary peace treaty. Who knows? Maybe we'll prevent the Cold War before it even starts. But right now, I've got several hundred very confused Jaffa hanging around the 'gate, wondering what the hell happened to Ra and Qetesh, so we better get down there.” He turned to An. “Scottie, beam us out.”
An stood. “My name is An, and I am going with you.”
“What do you mean?” Jack objected. “The entire reason we went through this was to recover you—and don't even start on Asgard law, because—”
“He's right, sir,” Sam interrupted, reaching for the transport controls.
“Oh, for cryin' out loud!”
“I belong in this time—and this timeline,” An replied simply.
Nodding, Sam added, “We'll recover you in our 1947. We have to, because it's the only thing that explains the tunnel on the wrong side of the Antarctic 'gate.”
“What wrong tunnel?” Jack demanded.
“There's a jumper sized hole on the far side of the Antarctic Stargate, sir, not the side where the vortex hits. I've often speculated—”
“Stop!” Jack ordered, wincing. Daniel suspected a migraine was hovering. “Carter. If you say so, I believe you.”
She smiled thinly. “Trust me, sir. This will work.”
“That's what you said when you sent me on this merry goose chase,” he reminded her.
“That was the future me, sir.”
“Whatever. Let's just get the hell outta here.”
“An?” Sam smiled at him. “Will you be okay, here...if?”
“I will be fine, Colonel Carter. Your speculation that this timeline will continue on a separate path is the most likely scenario. Once an Asgard ship comes to investigate, they will detect my locator beacon. I also believe that the High Council will be very interested to learn about this.” He glanced around at the jumper. “Fifth Race, indeed.”
Jack turned to Cam and grinned before addressing Commander Bennett. “Meanwhile, you can take him to your leader.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Vala's words broke through the steel wool clag that inhabited Cam's skull. “Y'know, you have to wonder, don't you?”
Opening one eye, he saw her sitting with her back to a soot-covered brick wall, young Howard huddled beside her, apparently hanging off every word. “Regards to what?”
“Well, let's face it,” Vala was saying. “Assuming the Ancients did recreate all life in this galaxy, what were they thinking when they created the Goa'uld? I've come across some nasty specimens in my time, but a creature that mixes its DNA with a human to create a slave race, and then sets itself up as a god?”
“Didn't you say they were false gods?” Howard asked.
“As distinct from true gods? I mean have you encountered any of those around the universe?” She smiled and turned to him. “No of course you haven't but aside from the odd fundamentalist who doesn't seem to need proof in any form, I haven't met anyone yet who really fits that description. And let's face it, the Ancients aren't stacking up too well in that regard, despite this whole Ascension thing they've got going.”
“What...the hell happened?” Cam asked, pushing himself up. The last thing he remembered was walking into a tack room and—crap. “Did someone shoot me?”
He brought his hand up and felt around his groin. It was tacky with dried blood, and there was a hole in the cloth directly above...
Vala smiled at him brightly. “Oh good, you're awake. We better get going before it gets too light, or we'll be spending the day hiding among these garbage cans. And yes, you did get shot, but don't worry, all the bits are back in place and it's all healed up. As to whether they're in working order—”
A white light in front of his eyes blurred everything for a moment and then he was...
...staring at the back of a seat inside the jumper—which rapidly turned into a pair of dust-covered glasses with a frowning Daniel Jackson behind them, demanding to know if he was all right.
“Peachy.” Which was more than he could say for the slightly—well, badly—singed looking guy lying on the deck beside him. “Who's that?”
Jackson didn't reply but instead swiveled around and said to Vala, “Can you heal him?”
“Hello, Vala,” she said. “It's ever so nice to see you survived crashing through the floor of a burning building, not to mention your heroic rescue of Colonel Mitchell, and that you healed that rather nasty hole in his—”
“Yes, yes, thank you Vala, you did a superb job but can you please heal this man otherwise...well, we really, really, don't have time to go into the reasons right now, but take my word for it, the future of the human race depends on it.”
Jackson's words tumbled out so fast it took Cam a few moments to process them.
Vala—having not been so recently shot and apparently mortally wounded—picked up on the situation immediately. “Oh, well why didn't you say as much?”
Grasping hold of the jumper's passenger seat, Cam pulled himself to his feet. The light from Vala's hand device filled the cargo bay. He peered out through the windscreen. The jumper was about two thousand miles above the Eastern seaboard. Then he glanced at Sam, and noticed that she was wearing most of a set of Jaffa armor. A quick check of O'Neill, Teal'c and Jackson confirmed that they were similarly dressed.
Squinting at Daniel, Cam said, “Look, Jackson, I know you weren't happy with the whole bonnet thing, but did I miss something, here?”
“What do you mean?” Daniel stared at him in confusion.
“The Jaffa outfits?”
“What?” O'Neill remarked from the pilot seat. “You don't like our new uniforms?”
Daniel offered up a cryptic smile and turned to look out the windscreen, then an image on the HUD. It seemed nobody was willing to offer an explanation. “Looks like the fire's under control,” he said to Jack, who nodded with relief.
“There was a fire?”
The light faded, and Vala paused and sat back on her heels. He could see her disguise was ripped and burned in places, her hair looked like it had tangled with the Godzilla of hair dryers and the sweat on her face was making railway tracks through a solid layer of soot.
“Is something wrong?” Daniel asked with concern.
“I'm going to need a few moments,” Vala sai
d. “Do you need him nice and shiny new? Or just, you know, not dead?”
“He was dead?” Sam briefly dragged her attention away from her laptop.
“I'm good.” Vala lifted her hand and the light played over the guy again. “But I'm not that good. Still, he would have been dead soon enough.”
“He has to be completely fit and healthy,” Daniel said, directing his remark to Vala.
“This is going to take a while, then,” said Vala. “He's in a bad way.”
The grizzly burn that had taken off half the guy's face began to heal over.
Cam watched her for a moment and then turned to Daniel. “Will someone please tell me what's going on around here? I'm out of it for a few hours, and—”
“More like decades,” Daniel muttered.
“Then we can get back to Antarctica,” said the General.
Antarctica. Cam peered out the windscreen again. They were definitely still over the United States, although he could see clear down to Cuba from this aspect.
“Sam?”
She looked up, and her gaze briefly settled on his forehead before she offered him a tired smile. That's when he noticed she looked like she'd been through a couple of fires herself. “Hey, Cam. It's good to see you. Really.” She turned back to I the computer.
“How's Three Finger doing?” O'Neill asked.
“Three Finger?” The name, weird as it was, rang a bell. Cam turned his attention to Vala's patient.
“If you mean this gentleman,” Vala replied, “On whom the future of the human race apparently rests, almost as good as new— Whoa!” A beam of light enveloped Three Finger and he vanished while she was speaking. She turned to Sam in outrage. “What did you do that, for?”
“He was healed, right?”
“Well yes, but you could have given me a moment's warning.
The view outside abruptly altered as the jumper took off in a southerly direction. “Sorry, but we couldn't afford for him to wake up in here.”
“Mordecai 'Three Finger' Brown,” Daniel replied, “died in the fire we accidentally started at Brown University in 1908, setting in motion a chain of events that—”
“It wasn't supposed to happen,” Sam finished, her attention split between her laptop and an Asgard scanner that looked significantly different to the model that had been sitting there just a few hours earlier. “We had to make sure that this time, he survived.”
This time?
She offered Cam another brief smile and returned her attention to her computer, leaving him no more enlightened than he had been a few moments ago.
Hoping the Jaffa might know something, Cam looked to Teal'c. “Hey, buddy—”
“It is good to see you again, Colonel Mitchell,” Teal'c said. “I am pleased that you are no longer First Prime to Qetesh.”
Cam stared at him blankly. Vala reacted immediately, however. Her head snapped up. “Qetesh? Please don't tell me she's involved in any of this?”
Cam didn't even want to know about Qetesh. But he'd just realized someone was missing who'd been here the last time he was in the jumper. “What have you done with Loki?”
Outside, they were just coming up to Florida.
“Pull up a chair, Mitchell,” O'Neill suggested. “It's a very long story.” Then he glanced at Sam and added with a distinctly childish smirk, “And Carter can't wait to tell you all about it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
So, somewhere out there in a, presumably budded-off time loop, Vala thought, she'd married that rather nice boy from her village, most likely had several babies—real babies, not the genetically created abomination that the Ori had used her body to manufacture, just so they could break the Ancients' rules—and lived a fully and doubtless happy life free of Goa'uld infestation.
On the other hand, another version of herself had ended up back in the hands of Qetesh, had two children destined to become hosts for Ra and Qetesh—which was an option that she really would much prefer not to think about—and ended up being...what? “Was the nuclear bomb actually detonated aboard Qetesh's ship?”
From the front seat of the jumper, Sam's expression turned pensive. “Yes.”
Well, it could have been worse. She could have ended up in Baal's company again—another option that definitely was not worth thinking about.
“And I stayed behind to clean up the mess, huh?” Cam said.
If Sam's smile seemed a little forced, her tone was more upbeat. “Last seen, Cam, you were about to take an Asgard to meet Harry S. Truman.”
While Vala had no idea what was so amusing, Cam laughed. “What, you mean like take me to your leader?'
“See,” General O'Neill remarked from the pilot's seat. “He thinks it's funny.”
The jumper was descending in darkness, but the HUD indicated they were coming up to a landmass that, enhanced on the screen, Vala recognized as the frozen continent at the bottom of the planet—bottom, of course, being a term that hardly meant much from space, but it was another one of those cultural things she'd gotten down quite well. A reassuring blip denoting naquadah indicated that the second Stargate was present there. It was midwinter and the current outside temperature was, according to the display, a bracing minus forty-three degrees. Centigrade. “Chilly. Tell me we're not going to have to get out and dig?”
The blip on the screen enlarged, and Sam replied, “The Antarctic 'gate was left behind by the Ancients when they took Atlantis to the Pegasus Galaxy, millions of years ago. When General O'Neill and I arrived here by accident in 1998, the 'gate was buried beneath a glacier several hundred feet deep.”
“What about when the Ancients came back, ten thousand years ago?”
“We believe that was through the 'gate at Giza,” said Daniel, “Which Ra put there in prehistoric times, soon after he took his first human host. According to Plato, the Atlanteans had 'subjugated the lands of Libya and Egypt' before their descendants moved to Athenia—modern day Athens. We now know that most of the Lanteans left because they found Earth too primitive.
“Prior to the construction of the pyramids, Ra sometimes didn't return to Earth for decades, even centuries at a time. There's no naquadah on Earth, so it wasn't the most desirable of locations except insofar as it provided a readymade population of slaves. Presumably that's why he began extracting entire civilizations and seeding them around the galaxy to naquadah-rich planets.”
Before Daniel had a chance to get too deeply into the entire history of Earth, Sam, thankfully, jumped ahead. “In 1998,” she explained, “I was kind of surprised that the Antarctic 'gate wasn't completely buried in ice, with only a cavern the size of the one we found ourselves in under Cheyenne Mountain. Instead, much of the area around the 'gate and DHD had been thoroughly excavated, and there was a tunnel all the way to the surface.”
“Positively homely, I thought,” said the General.
Sam winced, which reminded Vala that she had a considerable amount of reading to catch up on when they returned to the SGC.
“Didn't you find dead Jaffa near the DHD?” Cam asked.
“Two. We think the Jaffa tried to blast their way out using their staff weapons, but dating of the bodies indicated that that was thousands of years ago,” Sam explained. “Probably soon after the Egyptian 'gate was buried, but the thing is, I found a tunnel to the surface.”
“And this is unusual because...?”
“There's very little snowfall over that area of the Antarctic, so little that it's actually classified as a desert. Consequently the glacier over the 'gate is relatively slow moving. With no rainfall or melt-water tunneling through crevasses, there shouldn't have been any kind of opening to the surface, certainly not one that close to the 'gate.
“There was also a tunnel the exact size and shape of a jumper leading out the other side. It was just too coincidental. Slow moving doesn't mean no movement, however, and even had the Jaffa and the Ancients created the tunnels, both would have completely closed within a few decades. Glaciologists calculated t
hat whatever burrowed through to the 'gate must have done so sometime within the previous fifty years.”
“And that someone was you?” Vala asked.
“Took a little while,” O'Neill said, angling the jumper down.
“And a lot of naquadah,” Sam added. “But I ran the calculations before we left. We still have enough for the next leg.”
“Next leg?” The display on the HUD altered to show an enhanced illumination of the landscape—or more correctly, snowscape—which, apart from some rather attractive magnetic field lights in the sky, was in darkness. That's when she remembered that Earth rotated slightly off its access, and that this end of the planet was in winter.
Stargate - SG-1 - 09 - Roswell Page 34
