CHAPTER SIX
“Jumper One you are cleared for takeoff,” Carter called over the radio.
“Thought we'd settled on Homer,” O'Neill muttered.
“I quite like Dr. Lee's Tempus Fugit,” Vala said.
The jumper lifted smoothly off the hangar floor, rotated a half turn and exited through a tall doorway and outside into bright sunlight. A paved surface stretched out before them. Apparently it had been built to allow their archaic winged aircraft to become airborne. Given the level of technology now available to them, Vala couldn't understand the attachment the inhabitants of the planet had for this primitive mode of transport, except perhaps that their 'jets' created criss-cross patterns called contrails in an otherwise cloudless sky.
“Tempus Fugit is the mission name,” General Carter informed them over the radio.
The way in which O'Neill's mouth twisted into an uncertain line prompted Vala to say, “It means—”
“I know what it means. I'd just as sooner forget the three months of Daniel teaching me Latin, is all.”
Vala strongly suspected that had something to do with the favorite cereal comment he'd made earlier. While it might prove vaguely entertaining to entice the story from him, she decided that it would be more fun extracting it from Daniel.
“Heading due east to an altitude of six hundred miles. We can't track you on radar now you're in stealth mode,” Carter added, “so advise any course deviation.”
“Why do we need stealth mode over miles and miles absolutely nothing?” Vala wondered. The view was singularly uninspiring. To their left, a wide swathe of dirty white saltpan glinted in the sunlight. Everywhere else, the land was sunbaked and barren, reminding Vala a little of Asdak's world.
An insert in the HUD adjusted to display a magnified view of people having what looked like a picnic, not far from the base. Vala had noticed them earlier, but hadn't paid them much mind, as picnics seemed to be all the rage on Earth. Then she realized that they were all facing in one direction—toward the base. “What are the looking at?”
“Us,” O'Neill replied.
“But they can't see us because we're invisible...right?”
The grin reappeared. “Exactly.”
It took her a moment to process that, before she smiled. “Oh! I've got it now. I saw this on Sol's tapes. You don't want any of the people who already know that you're using advanced alien technology to know that you're using advanced alien technology.”
With that mystery solved, she turned her interest to the darkening sky. The vague sense of oppression she felt when planet-bound receded at the first hint of stars.
Vala had often contemplated the stars as a child, wondering if they truly were, as her father had once told her, the hearth fires of distant worlds inhabited by terrible gods. The tiny jewels in the darkness had seemed too beautiful, too warm and inviting to be truly so bad.
How wrong she had been.
And yet, they had not lost their allure, and an old desire beckoned. “Do you ever wish you could just leave it all behind and keep going? Maybe find a simple little world where no one has ever heard of the Goa'uld or the Ori or even the Ancients?”
She was really just thinking out loud. It surprised her when O'Neill said, “Found a place like that once.”
“Really? How long did you stay?”
“Three months.”
She wondered if it had been boredom or a sense of duty that had pulled him away, but before she could ask him about it, the images flashing on the Asgard sensor drew her attention. “Oh my, you do have an awful lot of people who seem to be important enough to carry locator beacons.”
It wasn't a bad idea, she supposed. In the event of a full-scale attack by the Ori, key personnel could be beamed to safety and evacuated. “Do you think one of these is Senator Fishface? Here's an idea! We could test the Asgard transport on him if you like. Plonk him into one of the local brothels, perhaps? Might loosen him up a bit.”
Was that a smirk on O'Neill's face?
“Okay, base,” he announced for the benefit of Carter and the others back on Earth, without looking at Vala. “We're in position.”
The atmosphere blanketing the planet had thinned to a hazy glow across the curved horizon. Carefully checking the scanner again, Vala nodded and glanced at General O'Neill. “All set.”
“Then let's get this baby up to eighty-eight.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Despite her earlier remarks about the various temporal devices available on the market these days, and her casual acceptance of post hoc reasoning, she'd never actually heard of anyone who had successfully traveled in time. “When are we off to, first?”
O'Neill closed his eyes. “Figured maybe a nice round number, like fourteen hundred.”
A soft hum from the rear of the jumper increased in tempo, and the stars briefly flickered before shifting slightly. The cloud formations below had also altered significantly. The readout on the HUD indicated several changes in the atmospheric content, considerably less carbon dioxide and methane, for starters, and the Asgard scanner registered only hers and O'Neill's signals.
After a moment of expectant silence, Vala beamed at him. “Well, that seemed to have worked.”
The hum from the time machine increased and the stars shifted again and——the impact flung Vala from her chair and into the windscreen.
She'd been injured far too often, been in the thick of far too many space battles to allow the shock of pain that tore through her leg to interfere with her reactions. Nevertheless, recent experiences of being burned alive had her gulping back a cry at the conflagration engulfing the jumper.
The fireball vanished; either starved of oxygen in the vacuum of space or because they'd passed through whatever wreckage had resulted from what was clearly their arrival at the wrong time and place. Thanks to Dr. Lee's short course on things that go bump in the skies around Earth, she could only assume they'd encountered one of those big, bulky bits of expensive junk, like the International Space Station, which would undoubtedly irritate a few people.
Or not.
The jumper was spinning wildly. She caught a brief flash of what looked suspiciously like a chunk of Asgard ship with an escort of tinsel fragments trailing off in one direction, while the bulk of the ship, still venting atmosphere, limped away in the other.
Which could only have meant that the jumper had arrived partially embedded inside the ship's hull.
“Oops.”
Squeezing her eyes shut to clear the pinwheel lights blurring her vision, Vala tried extracting herself from the windscreen. Not so easy. Something bulky—O'Neill's legs, by the feel of it—was half on top of her, and the inertial dampeners had evidently decided that without his mind controlling them, they were free to do as they wished. Even injured and unconscious, though, O'Neill appeared to be maintaining some degree of control because the jumper's shield had done a commendable job. They hadn't burned to a crisp, for one thing, and from the lack of telltale hissing—and the fact they were still breathing—there were no leaks.
The first time jump had gone smoothly. Carter had provided them with this exact location, so it was likely this was no accident. It explained why Vala had smelled a scam. And the General's pointed glance at the First Aid kit took on a whole new meaning, too. “You could have given us just a bit more of a warning,” she muttered angrily. “I mean, how much trouble would it have been to say something along the lines of hang on!”
The pressure across her legs fell away and she spun backward.
Terrific, the inertial dampeners had kicked in but now they'd lost artificial gravity, presumably because O'Neill's unconscious mind was playing havoc with the controls. A segment of blue and white planet sped past the windscreen at an alarming rate, vanished, and then reappeared moments later. The jumper was spinning out of control in what looked—based on the next rotation—to be a rapidly decaying orbit.
Under any other circumstances Vala' prio
rities would be to regain control of the ship, assess the damage and find a way to either fix it or abandon ship—not necessarily in that order. Unfortunately jumpers were the one piece of technology the Ancients had—for whatever selfish reason—designed to be operated exclusively by them, or at least those bearing their genes. She grabbed a fistful of O'Neill's jacket in one hand, and, ducking the globs of blood streaming past, pushed against the upper bulkhead, hoping to jam him into the pilot's seat.
“General! C'mon, wakey wakey!”
Angling around beside him, she caught sight of his skull—literally, because even beneath the blood and gore, white bone was visible—and immediately abandoned that idea. Jack O'Neill wasn't going to wake at all unless he received medical attention very, very soon.
The Earth, partially in shadow now, skipped passed again and the interior of the jumper briefly plunged into darkness. Six telltale lights on the Asgard monitor caught her attention. She may not be able to access to the jumper's flight systems or the time machine, but Asgard technology was less finicky. Releasing her grip on O'Neill, she turned her full attention to the monitor.
Two signals were faint but so close that it was entirely possible they were one signal with a weak Doppler shifting accounting for the slight difference. The additional four were underground and immediately identifiable as Daniel, Cam, Sam and Teal'c.
General Carter had gotten them into this mess, Vala was certain of it; so she—or her younger self, at least—could bloody well get them out. Acquiring the four confirmed signals, she was about to beam them aboard when the transport also confirmed a lock on the one of the weaker signals, which, it now confirmed, was that of an Asgard.
Vala slammed the control and for a brief, gut-wrenching moment, she thought O'Neill had brought the jumper back in time several weeks too late. The stench of putrefaction hit her before the prone bodies had fully materialized in the tiny space behind the jumper's seats. Then a slightly damaged Asgard popped into existence on top of Daniel, prompting him to issue a high-pitched yelp.
“Well don't just float there!” Vala barked at the new arrivals—what was that smell?—who seemed to be doing a lot of gasping for air. “Help me get control of this thing.”
Having gone from full gravity to none to speak of in the blink of an eye, none of them appeared capable of controlling anything at the moment. The Asgard was in the worst shape, she noted as he floated past. A portion of his torso bore some gruesome scorch marks, but SG-1 didn't look all that good, either. And that smell... Something akin to a rotting swamp, was the closest she could come to describing it. The new arrivals also appeared to be covered in numerous bleeding bites of some kind. Bayou was home to either swarms of extraordinarily vicious insects or they'd found a bizarre health spa featuring beds of nails and mudpacks in dire need of perfumed additives, all of which left Vala with only one option. With no time to explain, she hauled herself out of the chair, and, pushing off the windshield, barreled through the jumper between Teal'c and Mitchell, to the rear compartment.
“What the hell is going on?” Mitchell called between gasps. His face was a bloodied mess, and there appeared to be a piece missing out of his nose.
“That cultural reference Daniel was talking about. The one with frying-pans and fires?” Vala went to grab the First Aid kit—which was not where she'd last seen it. Along with half the other so-called 'stowed' equipment, it was floating, or more accurately, tumbling around in free flight in the cargo bay.
“You call this a rescue?” Daniel gasped.
“A bit of gratitude wouldn't be misplaced, you know.”
Something collided with her wrist, knocking her grip free and sending her bumping into the time machine. Inside the cockpit, arms and legs were flaying around, trying to get a grip on something in the microgravity. It was like watching a badly choreographed dance in free fall, laced with pearls of burgundy spiraling around the cabin. More worrisome was the brief glimpse of the magenta hue through the windshield. The jumper's shields might protect them from the heat of reentry, but she doubted they would help much when the ship banged into the ground.
Carter pulled off her pack, grabbed the back of a chair behind General O'Neill and lowered herself into the copilot's chair. Typically, she seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation faster than the others. “The inertial dampeners must still partially be operational otherwise we wouldn't be tumbling.”
“Can you get this thing operational?” Mitchell demanded, shrugging out of his own pack and jamming it beside the seat and the bulkhead, before giving Teal'c a hand. In the micro-gravity Carter's pack just added to the confusion of things floating around inside the jumper.
“I can't fly a jumper,” Carter said in the closest thing to a panicky voice that Vala had ever heard her use. “I don't have the Ancient gene.”
“Ford never had the gene, either, but he stole one from Atlantis.”
“Maybe, but then it didn't have a time machine installed.”
A red cross on a large white box tumbled past Vala's field of vision. She snatched at it while Mitchell and Carter continued in argue the finer points of what should and should not be possible. As far as Vala was concerned, the subject of discussion was rather moot. Fact was, with O'Neill out of commission, they were all rather royally screwed.
After several aborted attempts, she finally latched onto the First Aid kit, and pulled open the lid. The sight of the Goa'uld hand device resting on top of the contents didn't come as much of a surprise as it should have. She batted away the useless bits in plastic bags floating out of the box and slipped the device over her fingers. Catapulting through the crowd of bodies, packs and weapons cluttering up the tiny jumper's main cabin, she zeroed in on the person wearing the least amount of pukey-green gunk. What had the others been doing on Bayou?
Someone grabbed her from behind. She was about to object when she realized it was Teal'c. He must have understood her intent because he was trying to steady her while Daniel positioned O'Neill into the pilot's seat and placed the General's hands on the controls. Carter was working on the Asgard transport. She glanced at the hand device and then looked at Vala. “If that doesn't work, I'll get ready to beam us out of here.”
Not exactly Vala's first choice, but better than the alternative since the view through the windscreen was now rather fiery, and gravity was definitely coming back into play. She held the device over the mangled mess of hair and bone that had been the side of O'Neill's head, and began a process first introduced to her by Qetesh.
As with everything undertaken by Qetesh, the Goa'uld's use of the device had been perverse and contradictory. Brutality applied with finesse, pleasure given purely to inflict pain; a potent and enormously effective strategy for maintaining control of one's minions, especially those Qetesh had kept as bedroom pets.
Still, it was this finesse and the residual traces of naquadah in her blood that allowed Vala to repair the damage to O'Neill. The ribbon of light exposed so much: an echo of thoughts and powerful, suppressed emotions beneath fragments of smashed bone and crushed blood vessels. While she couldn't discern the exact details, it took little more than her willingness to repair the damage to make it happen. Interestingly, there were deeper injuries that O'Neill had kept hidden; chest and knees and—
Daniel was looking over O'Neill's shoulder, his expression grim. “C'mon, Vala. We're running out of time!”
She wanted to snap back a reply, but the words wouldn't form. No matter, she need only concentrate on O'Neill's head... but her arm felt unnaturally heavy. The magenta glow now filling the jumper darkened to cherry, and then the hue of old and dried blood. Someone was yelling at her, but she had no idea who. She had to concentrate on the wound, the fracture in O'Neill's skull. The bones knit and she caught the fragmented stream of his thoughts...baseball, Cubs... World Series.
The words were important, strange words Carter had told her she must think while she and O'Neill remained connected in this most tenuous of ways, Cy Young's second no h
itler beat the Highlanders.
And then she blacked out.
It was only moments later that she regained consciousness. Looking at O'Neill's head, she was relieved to sense that all the bits were where they were supposed to be, and his bleeding had stopped. Beneath the matted gore that had spilled down his face his injury was healed.
Why, then, the string of ruby pearls streaming past her vision? Pretty pearls, bittersweet and coppery, just like those on the beaches of her home world that had been a source of protein when the hunters of her village had returned empty handed. As children, she and her brother had often gathered the pulpy strings of sea-pearls disgorged by a restless sea and abandoned by the outgoing tide. Bubbles of blood-col-ored weed that had tasted of the clean ocean and far-off lands, places she had longed to visit.
A feeble voice, what little remained of her true self, perhaps, reminded her that she had no such experiences as a child. The rich memories were from a different host, compounded with those of countless others hosts taken by Qetesh long before the Goa'uld had set her sights on Vala.
Stargate SG1 - Roswell Page 6
