STARGATE SG-1 ATLANTIS: Homeworlds : Volume three of the Travelers' Tales (SGX Book 5)

by Sally Malcolm

  She counted down the remaining seconds, hoping her crew had indeed secured all stations, and then opened a hyperspace window, moved the Hammond into it, and immediately transitioned out of it.

  Looking at the viewport, the stars were mostly the same. She was in the same system, but there was a planet and a mothership nearby instead of a flaring sun.

  “Nice flying, ma’am,” the pilot said with a smile. “That’s almost as cool as the time you blew up a sun.”

  Shaking her head, Carter said, “Boy, you blow up one sun, and you just get a reputation.” She rose, allowing the pilot to relieve her at the helm. “Major, the Hammond is yours. Keep her safe.”

  With that, she headed to the 302 bay.

  “I’m unarmed.”

  Carter said that as soon as she stepped out of the cockpit of the 302 to find half a dozen zats pointed at her.

  Kefflin stepped forward to greet her at the landing bay on a plateau of the mountain where the large base was located. Teal’c and Rak’nor were behind him, their hands bound behind their backs, zats pointed at their heads by two Alliance thugs.

  “I’m sure you are,” Kefflin said, “but you’ll forgive me if I keep weapons pointing at your head for the duration of your stay.” He turned to the two holding zats on the Jaffa. “Put them in the vessel. Once they’re inside, remove the shackles.”

  Teal’c looked at Carter. Carter simply gave him a nod and said, “It’s okay, Teal’c. They’re expecting you back on the Hammond.”

  Whirling around to face Carter, Kefflin said, “‘Back’ on the Hammond, eh? So you admit your duplicity?”

  Carter said nothing. She just hoped that Teal’c got the hint and would fly straight to the Hammond because she needed him to leave Rak’nor’s cargo ship in orbit.

  A few minutes later, the 302 took off with Teal’c in the pilot seat, while Carter was led into the base.

  The woman who’d been at the workstation rose to her feet. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I usually do. And when I don’t, I keep at it until I figure it out.” She sat down at the seat the woman had abandoned.

  The first thing she did was activate the shield. That took all of a minute.

  “Shield is active!” The woman turned to Carter. “I’m impressed, Colonel.”

  “Thank you, ah —”

  “I’m Qirarra.”

  “Qirarra, I need you to keep an eye on the power output. The shield’s at maximum, and I want to make sure it doesn’t burn the systems out.”

  “Understood.” Qirarra went to do that very thing.

  Which was good, as Qirarra’s task was wholly unnecessary. But Carter needed Qirarra to not see what Carter was doing.

  She studied the device, and saw that it could indeed age a sun artificially, although from her quick look, Carter didn’t see how it could be controlled. In fact, based on the readings, this sun would go nova inside a year. That time frame had been more like a decade before that last beam hit it.

  Looking around, she saw that the rings were halfway across the chamber.

  That was going to be the hard part.

  Qirarra looked over at Carter. “I can’t believe this. I’ve been struggling with this thing for months, and it won’t respond to me at all.”

  “The Goa’uld don’t like other people to play with their toys,” Carter said. “It was their adaptation of the Ancients’ technology that could only be used by someone with their genetic code. In this case, you have to have naquadah in your blood.”

  “Sounds disgusting.”

  Carter chuckled. “It has its moments.”

  While she spoke to Qirarra, she armed, but did not activate, the base self-destruct, and also preprogrammed the rings to send her up to Rak’nor’s cargo ship, still cloaked in orbit

  At least she hoped it was. If it wasn’t, she’d wind up on the nearest ring transporter that could receive the signal — Kefflin’s mothership — which would not be ideal.

  Finally, she found the control for the lights in the chamber.

  It took her the better part of half an hour to work her way through the base’s systems, while ostensibly looking for ways to better control the Sun-breaker and strengthen the shields. However, she was now ready to go.

  The flare would hit in ten minutes.

  After one final look to commit the direction and distance of the ring platform to memory, she set the rings to activate in fifteen seconds and then all at once she activated the self-destruct to go off in five minutes, lowered the shield, and turned out the lights in the chamber. Even if Qirarra or someone managed to deactivate the self-destruct, the flare would still do significant damage to the base.

  With luck, one or the other would destroy this Sun-breaker technology once and for all.

  Chaos reigned in the newly darkened chamber as Carter jogged in the direction of the rings, keeping her hands in front of her in an attempt not to bump into anything.

  Briefly, the chamber was illuminated by a blast from a zat, and then another, and Carter also heard someone scream.

  Ten seconds had passed, and she thought she was pretty close to the rings.

  Then someone tackled her from behind and she and the tackler skidded across the chamber floor.

  The rings activated and that illuminated the room, revealing that Carter was, in fact, on the ring platform.

  And so was Qirarra.

  After a blinding flash of light, Carter found herself in the hold of Rak’nor’s ship, along with Qirarra —

  — who was pointing a zat at her.

  “Send us back, Colonel, right now.”

  “That would be a really bad idea. I set the self-destruct for five minutes. If Kefflin is smart, he’s abandoning the base.”

  “You’re trying to destroy Sun-breaker?” Qirarra asked.

  Carter nodded.

  “Good. I’ve been trying to wipe that thing out for months, but the controls wouldn’t respond.” Activating the zat from standby mode, she added, “Don’t get any ideas, Colonel. I’m still loyal to the Alliance. But Sun-breaker doesn’t work properly and it will only result in destruction. Now you’re going to fly this cargo vessel to the mothership, and report to Vashin — or Kefflin, if he abandons the base like you think he might.”

  “Absolutely.” Carter moved toward the door to the bridge and opened it. Then she hesitated.

  Qirarra moved closer and put the zat at Carter’s back with her right hand. “Move!”

  Carter whirled around, grabbed Qirarra’s right wrist with her left hand and twisted it. Qirarra cried out in pain and lost her grip on the zat, which Carter caught with her right hand and immediately fired at Qirarra.

  The Alliance woman’s stunned form fell to the deck. One of the first tricks they taught you in hand-to-hand training at the Academy was how to disarm someone holding a gun right at your back or at your head.

  “Sorry, kiddo, but you get to be my prisoner, not the other way around,” Carter said before entering the bridge and activating the flight controls. As she did so, she also activated the communications system, broadcasting on the frequency used by Earth’s ships. “Hammond, this is Carter.”

  Teal’c replied. “It is good to hear your voice, Colonel Carter.”

  “Yours, too, Teal’c. Glad you and Rak’nor made it on board. I’m coming in hot in the cargo ship. I should dock in seventy-five seconds. Ready the hyperdrive and head back to Earth as soon as the cargo ship’s secure.”

  Then her heart sank as she saw Kefflin’s mothership fire on the Hammond.

  Knowing her ship’s shields were at ten percent and that the Asgard beam weapons weren’t working, Carter feared for the safety of her command.

  But then then weapons fire was dispersed by Hammond’s shields, whi
ch appeared to be at full power. A moment later, an Asgard beam weapon sliced through one of the mothership’s outer struts.

  “I’m impressed,” Carter said, “I was only gone an hour.”

  “I believe you have Major Hailey to thank for the rapid repair of the shields.”

  Carter smiled. Leave it to her protégée to repair the tactical systems in record time. “Well let’s get those shields down. I’m coming in.”

  The cargo ship entered the 302 bay, and Carter brought it to a smooth landing.

  Moments later, the Hammond went into hyperspace.

  Moments after that, there was a massive explosion on a mountain on P7X-942.

  “I suppose you think you’re clever.”

  Carter smiled at Qirarra’s words, spoken from inside the Hammond brig. “I don’t, honestly, but people whose judgment I trust keep insisting that I am.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything. I told you, I’m loyal to the Alliance.”

  “I’m sure you are. You’re lucky, Kefflin survived the destruction on P7X-942. The Sun-breaker is completely destroyed and based on what I found in the database, Heru’ur didn’t re-create his research anywhere else. In fact, he viewed it as a failed experiment.”

  “He was right about that,” Qirarra muttered.

  “Maybe you’ll be lucky and Kefflin will want to trade you for some considerations. Or maybe he’ll view your inability to get the Sun-breaker to work properly as a failure and he’ll cut you loose.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Qirarra said, “but the Tau’ri are still my enemy, and I won’t do a thing to help you.”

  “Suit yourself.” With that, Carter turned to leave the brig.

  Teal’c was walking down the corridor when she exited. “Is your prisoner awake?”

  Carter nodded. “And stubborn. She won’t betray her people.”

  “Perhaps I may speak to her — tell her of the value of betraying an evil cause in service of a good one.”

  “I’m not sure she sees us as a good cause, but I won’t stop you, either.” She sighed. “I’d better call Earth and let General O’Neill know what happened — and that the night sky’s going to look different in a few thousand years.” Then she snapped her fingers. “Oh, and the general wants to remind you that he wants to see the new Star Trek with you when you’re on Earth next.”

  “It will be my honor. Will you also be joining us?”

  “Nah.” Carter chuckled. “I prefer to leave the movie bonding to you two. Besides, I hear it involves time travel, and we get enough of that in real life…”

  “Indeed.”

  Stargate Atlantis

  The Player on the Other Side

  Amy Griswold

  This story takes place in season three of Stargate Atlantis

  “That’s strange,” Rodney McKay said.

  John Sheppard straightened up abruptly. He’d been sprawled in one of the lab chairs for an hour, despite probably having work to do of his own, but Rodney wasn’t about to take responsibility for John’s time management. “Weird as in interesting, or weird as in deadly? We’ve had a lot of deadly lately.”

  “Tell me about it,” Rodney said. “I nearly died not that long ago, remember?”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Rodney was not about to debate how traumatic his near-death experience with the Ascension device had been. In his opinion, all near-death experiences were traumatic, and the extent to which John took brushes with death in stride was borderline pathological. “Do you want to hear what’s strange or not?”

  “I would like to hear what’s strange,” Elizabeth said, leaning in the doorway of the lab. Rodney straightened up in his own chair. He felt that he was skating on a certain amount of thin ice with Elizabeth since the other recent unfortunate incident involving what he had genuinely believed to be a computer game, but which had turned out to be an Ancient social experiment that controlled the lives of actual people. “Rodney?”

  “Well,” he began cautiously. “I’ve been checking to make sure that no one else was running the ‘game’ —”

  “I think we agreed to stop calling it a game,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, right, the Ancient simulation that was controlling people on M4D-058. Which of course we would never have used if we’d known that it was provoking a real war.”

  “Or producing a society of Sam Carter lookalikes who plastered your face on their flag,” John added, in Rodney’s opinion, unnecessarily.

  “I was inspirational to them. But it was still all very wrong, yes,” Rodney said hurriedly. “So I’ve been trying to make sure that no one else was, for instance, inspiring a country’s leaders to stomp around in black leather.”

  “That was practical,” John said.

  “I would like to think that if anyone else had been using the simulation, they would have spoken up as soon as we learned that actual lives were at stake,” Elizabeth put in firmly, and Rodney frowned at John for distracting him from his point.

  “Yes, I would like to think that too, but Sheppard and I started playing the — started interacting with the simulation program two years ago, and a lot of people have left Atlantis since then. So, just to be safe, I’ve been checking for any other files associated with the simulation in the Atlantis computer system.”

  “And?” John prompted.

  “I just found another running simulation.”

  “Shut it down,” Elizabeth said at once.

  “Believe me, if it were that simple, I would have done it already,” Rodney said. “Here’s the thing that’s actually strange. There are files being stored in the Atlantis computer system, but I’m pretty sure that the simulation isn’t being controlled from Atlantis.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “How is that possible?”

  “Presumably through subspace communication, like the way the console here communicated with the Oracle on M4D-058,” Rodney said. “If there’s another control console for the simulation, it could be located at another Ancient installation pretty much anywhere in the Pegasus Galaxy. The main Atlantis computer system isn’t set up to decode the input or record its source.”

  “So what do we know?” Elizabeth asked, looking frustrated.

  “Not much,” Rodney had to admit. “What I’m getting is just a notification that PX7-MYB is involved in a game in progress. I can’t tell you who’s sending signals to their Oracle, or what the people there are being told to do, only that signals are still being sent.”

  “Do we know whether anybody’s listening?” John put in.

  “Good question, and, no, we don’t. I can tell you that the Oracle still exists, because it’s still sending back information to the other console. But it could be buried fifty feet underground, and we could be picking up what amounts to two computers playing a very pointless game of chess with each other. Without access to the equipment at either end, there’s no way to know.”

  “PX7-MYB,” Elizabeth mused. “Do we have anything on that world?”

  Rodney switched to searching the city’s database. “Not much there either. It looks like it was a farming world that supplied food to Atlantis when the Ancients still lived here. Apparently the locals called it Elista. That’s what we have: a name, and a record of some vegetable purchases ten thousand years ago. It’s on the list to be surveyed… looks like about eighteen months from now.”

  “Which could actually be a lot longer,” John said. “Now that Daedalus is making regular supply runs, surveying farming settlements has moved down our list of priorities below checking out worlds that might have technology we can use against the Wraith.”

  “I’m not complaining, gentlemen,” Elizabeth said. “But let’s move this one up in our list of priorities. Colonel Sheppard, I’d like you and your team to check it out.” />
  By the time the team was assembled, Rodney had reached the conclusion that he would like to have a word — actually, quite a few unprintable words — with the designers of the Ancient computer system. When he first came to Atlantis, he had felt what he had to privately admit was a sense of awe at being able to directly study the Atlantis computers and understand some fraction of the minds of their creators. After three years, he felt that he was beginning to understand their creators all too well.

  Some of them might have been wise and enlightened, like the ones who had Ascended. He liked to think that his own recent experiments with Ascension had taken him some distance in the “wise and enlightened” direction, even if he’d mainly been trying to save his own life. But it had become clear to him that many of the programmers of the Atlantis computers had been just as prone to kludgy shortcuts and inadequate documentation as any team of programmers on Earth who’d were working with an impossible deadline and too little coffee.

  That was the best explanation he could provide for dangerous devices like the one that had nearly forced him to Ascend being left unlabeled and unprotected from some idiot flipping a switch. In this case, he had been the idiot, but that was why things that could kill you needed to be idiot-proof, because under pressure, even certified geniuses flipped power switches before they thought through the consequences. And human beings — and probably even human-like beings — who found what looked like a game would try to play it.

  If he had been one of the Ancients, he wouldn’t have left Atlantis until he’d taped signs to everything attractive and lethal saying “don’t touch this, even if it seems like a really good idea at the time” —

  “McKay. You with us?” Sheppard prompted. Teyla was shouldering her pack, and Ronon was in the lead with Sheppard, looking eager to stride through the gate and into the middle of what was likely to be a war zone.