by Stargate
Jack shuddered. “Too damn real for me.”
Daniel peered into one of the derelict cars, a rusting red Toyota with its nose rammed into the median strip. There was a skeleton inside, draped over the steering wheel. The rest of the vehicle was full of boxes, suitcases, some torn open, others intact. From where he stood, Jack could see the driver had died of a gunshot wound to the head. The entry point for the bullet through the spider-webbed windscreen was still visible. “This is Earth,” said Jackson. “This car has a Colorado license plate.”
Jade nodded solemnly. “We’re just a few miles outside the Denver city limits.” She pointed up along the highway. “There, see it?”
O’Neill squinted in the direction she indicated. For a second he couldn’t see anything, but then his eyes adjusted to the gray-on-gray of the landscape and suddenly he could see the lightless towers of the metropolis pushing up against the stony sky. Even from this far away, he could see the dullness of their shapes, the yawing chasms of a thousand shattered windows. Faint black streamers, like smoke, moved in the middle distance. “What is that?”
“Crows,” Jade replied. “Some species of birds had a natural immunity, but we never found out why. They’re about all that’s left at this point, along with the roaches.” The wind began to pick up, blowing fines of dust around their ankles. They walked on in silence, listening to the barren world around them.
“This is some sort of alternate reality…” said Daniel, after a while. Jack knew the look in his eyes, that moment when the guy started putting facts together in his head faster than anyone could follow. “I’ve seen the same kind of thing.”
Jade nodded, breaking in. “I know, the Quantum Mirror from P3R-233. I’ve heard the stories.” She shook her head. “This isn’t that, Daniel. Oh god, I wish it was.”
Jack grimaced. “If you’re making this stuff up to scare us, I admit, okay, it’s all too creepy for me.”
“This isn’t fantasy,” she insisted. “This is reality. This is fact. This is where I’m from, this is my now.” Jade sighed. “I’m showing you the last memory I have of Earth, from a little over thirty years in your future.”
“Say what?” O’Neill felt ice in his veins. “Where the heck are all the flying cars and robot maids? C’mon on now, it should look like The Jetsons, not… Not like this!”
“You’re from the future, that’s what this is all about?” Daniel fixed her with a hard look.
Jack kicked at loose stone. “Aw nuts. That would be a lot easier to ignore if we hadn’t done that 1960s trip ourselves.”
She nodded again. “From your viewpoint, in around two decades the Earth becomes a wasteland. Burnt-out, almost nothing left. Most of the population has died off, and those who didn’t fled off-world in ships or through the gate before the… Before the collapse. Some of us escaped to safe havens, places like Chulak and Holdfast. Not that it did us much good.”
Jade stopped and sat heavily on the hood of a gutted Chevy. It was hard for her to talk about this; the horrible reality of it was pressing down on her. Jack felt the emotion radiating off her like waves of heat. “This is the end result, the legacy of your harmless little treaty with the Pack. This is mankind dying a slow and lingering death.” She looked up at him. “This is what I’ve dedicated my life to stopping.”
Teal’c had once heard General Hammond speak of a particular combat engagement as being similar to ‘a knife fight in a phone booth’, and at the time, the Jaffa had found it difficult to visualize such a battle. Now, with the Re’tu’s limbs slashing the air around him and the confines of the swan-ship cockpit pressing in on them from all sides, he found a measure of understanding.
In the rush of the fight, Teal’c was losing himself, switching to pure animal adrenaline and pressing every ounce of his strength into disarming and beating the alien insect. He had already smashed the Re’tu’s beam gun from its grip and sent it skidding away, but with such a creature ‘disarming’ meant snapping the razor-sharp talons or outright rendering it insensate.
He rained punches against the arachnid’s softer underbelly, and it grunted with pain. Teal’c remembered where he had hurt it before, pressing into the thing’s injured leg and setting it off balance. The Re’tu had cut a swath through the SGC and left him for dead; the Jaffa was determined that this rematch would have a very different outcome.
A double-slash from twin leg-talons gouged his torso, but Teal’c shut out the pain. He could sense the alien was flagging, the will for battle ebbing under his ceaseless attacks. There was a moment he was waiting for, searching for, and it came. The Re’tu let its guard down for one fleeting instant and Teal’c pounced on the moment. His fist curled, the Jaffa sent a heavy punch into the alien’s mandibles and the insectoid’s crested head flicked back, bouncing hard off a support stanchion. Nerveless and dazed, the Re’tu slipped back down the console and sagged into a heap of chitin and claws, air wheezing from the breathing apertures in its torso.
Teal’c spat out a dribble of bloody spittle. “You are beaten. Submit.”
The alien raised its two forelimbs in surrender, cocking its head to the side to look over his shoulder. It was then the Jaffa realized that they were no longer alone.
When Jackson opened his eyes again, it was with a palpable wave of relief as he saw the drab but familiar walls of the SGC medical lab.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said Doctor Warner. “Let me know when you’re going to begin.”
“We just did… Whatever it was we did,” said O’Neill. “We must have been gone for what, ten or twenty minutes?”
Hammond shook his head. “No, Colonel. The three of you appeared to go into a trance for a couple of seconds, and that was it.”
“The passage of time in dreams always seems longer than it actually is,” Daniel noted.
Jack threw him a look. “My dreams usually involve ice hockey, fishing or tropical islands. Sometimes all three. That was a nightmare.”
“That is my world,” said Jade.
“I’ve seen the future, General,” said Jack, “and trust me, you’d wouldn’t like the décor.” O’Neill turned and studied Jade. “Okay. You’ve got our attention. Why don’t you tell us the rest of it?”
She licked her lips. “For the last few years we’ve been fighting a guerilla war. It’s all we could do, really, there were so few of us left. We scavenged whatever we could use in the fight, alien weapons, biological modifications…” She tapped her neck. “That’s where my implant came from, the nanomachines too. We had a few victories here and there, but in the end it counted for nothing. The damage had been done, see?” Her hand strayed to her stomach. “We’d already lost, we were already dead. We just hadn’t got there yet.” The woman nodded slowly to herself. “But then we found the hardware. Our Commander said we were due for our luck to change and he was right.”
“What hardware?” said Hammond, throwing Daniel a quizzical look.
“A lab. A storehouse of technology built by one of the Ancients, a guy called Janus.”
The name lit a spark in Jackson’s thoughts. “Janus,” he repeated. “Yes, we’ve come across his experiments before.” He looked at O’Neill. “You remember that weird Groundhog Day thing you and Teal’c got caught in on P4X-639? He built that.”
“Oy,” sniffed Jack, “Don’t remind me.”
“Time machines,” Jade said bluntly. “This genius had been experimenting with the flow of time, and he’d built a lot of prototypes. Big ones, small ones…” She made a shape with her hands.
Daniel suddenly realized what she meant. “The pod. The one we found in your quarters on the base, that was of Ancient design. You saying that’s a time-travel device?”
“A DeLorean in a little box?” offered Jack. “That’s pretty slick.”
Jade shrugged. “Actually, they’re bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. Something to do with the compacting of relative transcendental dimensional spaces…” She paused. “I don’t understand the
complete theory. But there were a few of them, and once we’d figured out how to operate the pods, we knew we had a chance to change the playing field. A chance to re-set things.”
Warner waved a hand. “Okay, this isn’t my field of expertise, it’s Bill Lee’s, but I’ve read the files. Don’t you need a solar eclipse or something to bend the gate’s wormhole around to make a time-warp?” He made loops in the air with his fingers.
“Solar flare,” corrected Hammond. “And he’s right.”
“But Janus found another way,” Daniel looked at Jade. “Something controllable.”
“The Stargate,” said the woman. “They exist in four dimensions… It’s like they have a footprint in time as well as a physical component. From the notes that we deciphered, at first Janus tried to build a time machine inside a small spacecraft, but then he went for a different approach. The gate network has existed since before the beginning of recorded human history. They’re unchanging points of reference in time as well as in space. He created devices that could ride on the back of the network, that you could use to transport people to any place, at any point in time— providing it was within a certain radius from an existing Stargate.” She blew out a breath, as if the effort of the explanation had drained her. “The gates do all the work. The pods are really just glorified portable beaming devices.”
O’Neill’s eyes narrowed and he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Does anyone else’s head hurt?”
Daniel nodded. It was mind-stretching stuff all right, but no more than many of the strange things SG-1 had encountered on their travels. “Sam’s gonna be kicking herself that she missed this.”
“The Re’tu used one of the pods to beam out of the base,” noted Hammond.
“Yes. Ite-kh moved in space but not time. A time jump takes a lot more power. We barely had enough make it back to 2003 again.”
“Again?” Jack eyed her.
She sighed. “This isn’t our first attempt, believe me. But multiple incursions into the same time period cause all kinds of problems.”
“Like meeting yourself?” suggested Warner. “I could see that might be embarrassing.”
“Like quantum instability and phase-space breakdown,” said Jade.
“Will you quit it with the ten-dollar words?” demanded O’Neill. “Okay, let’s say we’re buying the whole ‘time-traveler’ thing. If the Pack meeting was such a bad idea, why didn’t you just send us a note from the future, or something. We did that once.” He paused. “I mean, I did that once. Possibly. Or something.” Jack rubbed his eyes again. “Ugh. Where’s Carter when I need her?”
“What makes you think we didn’t?” Jade retorted. “Do you think we would have resorted to something as drastic as this if we hadn’t already exhausted every possibility?” She straightened and got to her feet. “If you think of time like a length of string, then this point in history is wound up in knots! We made ten separate incursions, some to make changes, others to undo the changes we’d made when they went wrong! You think you have a headache?” She tapped her temple. “Try figuring that out. You’re not even aware that your timeline has been cut, spliced and stitched back together! We barely knew what we were doing the first few times… We made a lot of mistakes.” The woman looked away. “And now we’re down to our last chance.”
“You’ve come from our future to change your past,” said Hammond carefully, sounding out the facts.
“From a future where the Earth’s a depopulated ruin,” said Daniel grimly.
“You’re a soldier, fighting those responsible for that?” The general got a nod from Jade in return. “Which begs the question— Who is your enemy? The Pack?”
She shook her head. “No. The Pack were just pawns. It was years before we found out the truth, and by then every one of them was dead.”
Teal’c’s labored breathing echoed in the cockpit and he peered at the new arrival. Blood was gumming shut his right eye and dozens of shallow cuts sang with pain across the skin of his bare arms and his torso. “Ryn,” he said.
The Pack warrior was quite still. In one hand he held the Jaffa’s staff weapon, and in the other the pistol that belonged to the Re’tu.
“This creature was aboard your ship,” he explained. “Perhaps… Preparing sabotage.”
“Perhaps,” agreed Ryn. There was a metallic click and the petal-shaped cowl at the end of the staff snapped open. Before Teal’c could react, an amber bolt of energy shrieked from the weapon’s maw and blew a fist-sized hole through the torso of the alien spider. The shot killed the Re’tu instantly, blasting fluids and flesh across the consoles and windows.
“It had surrendered!” Teal’c was furious. It mattered little to him that only moments before the Jaffa and the Re’tu had been trying to slay each other. The creature had shown honor and judgment in submitting to a superior foe, and the thought of butchering a prisoner was abhorrent to Teal’c. “Why… Why did you kill it?”
Ryn seemed distracted, uninterested in the Jaffa’s anger. He studied the beam gun, then threw a look at the out-of-place communicator unit and back at Teal’c. “You should not have come aboard my ship. You were not supposed to see that.”
Cold emotion glittered in Ryn’s eyes and Teal’c saw it coming. He threw himself forward across the cabin, but there was nowhere for him to hide.
Ryn squeezed the trigger bar and put a flare of light into the Jaffa’s chest, the impact blowing him backward to the floor. Smoke curled from the discolored patch of flesh on his chest, heavy with a sickly-sweet scent.
With care, the Pack warrior tossed the gun to land at the Re’tu’s feet and then dropped the staff weapon at Teal’c’s side. It was an inelegant solution, but the only one that presented itself. Ryn moved swiftly to the control console and replaced the enameled cover that concealed the silver communicator unit. Checking once more to make sure it was securely hidden, he took a deep breath of air and ran to the swan-ship’s rear hatch.
“Help!” he cried, pitching it at the perfect level of near-panic. “Someone, come quickly! We need a healer! The Jaffa has been hurt!”
Jade looked Jack in the eye. “They call themselves the Aschen.”
“Aw, son of a bitch!” O’Neill spat out the curse. “That miserable, boring blank-faced gang of losers? Didn’t we send them runnin’ after that thing with the Volians?”
“Who?” said Warner.
“P3A-194,” said Jackson, displaying once again his uncanny ability to retain seemingly-meaningless strings of letters and numbers. “Two years ago. A race calling themselves the Aschen Confederation tried to make a move on us, but I discovered they’d been systematically annexing planets, including a world called Volia. They wiped out the civilization there and turned it into a giant agricultural farm. We held them off, but in the process they captured a laptop full of gate addresses and a US ambassador.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Faxon. I remember.” He felt a sting of guilt at the man’s name. SG-1 had been forced to leave the ambassador in the hands of the Aschen; and given that the first gate code on that laptop had been for a planet in the process of being eaten by a black hole, he imagined that Joe Faxon— if he was still alive— would have been the target of any reprisals from the would-be alien conquerors.
Jade was nodding. “They didn’t take their defeat quietly, and we found that out the hard way. After you gave them a bloody nose on Volia, Earth and the SGC got put to the top of the Aschen’s most-hated list. They saw us as a threat to their plans for galactic expansion and set up an operation to wipe us out. It was lead by one of their top bioscience experts, a woman called Mirris.” She looked at Jack. “Remember an Aschen named Mollem?”
“Yeah. Gave new meaning to the word ‘dull’.”
“Mirris’s husband. Apparently, he was killed along with a lot of their top brass when they dialed the coordinates of a singularity that Colonel O’Neill had left in that gate directory. She didn’t take it well. Mirris cooked up the plan to do to Earth what they�
��d done to Volia and a hundred other planets.”
“Forced sterilization,” said Hammond.
“And then some. The Aschen engineered a smart bio-weapon that infiltrated the human population in a dormant state, spreading out through members of the SGC to their families, to everyone they came into contact with. After a couple of months, it went active, and by then it was global. The pathogen was 98 percent effective. It caused instant sterility in both sexes, immediate termination of all pregnancies.”
Warner’s hand went to his mouth. “Good grief.”
Jade nodded, her hand resting on her stomach. “Yeah. But it gets worse. The virus mutated. Mirris was sloppy… I guess she was too burned up by revenge to realize. The pathogen jumped species, killed plants and animals worldwide. It found its way to other planets and did the same there.” The lab was completely silent now; every one of them hung on her quiet words. “Things just fell apart. On Earth, there was chaos. Governments crashed, people turned against each other. Then the Stargate became public knowledge and it got even worse… Those that could escape, did. Those that couldn’t….” She looked away. “Here’s what it comes down to. Where I come from, there’s not enough Earth humans left to make a difference. In less than a generation, we’ll be extinct, and the same goes for the folks on a bunch of other planets too. The pathogen’s long gone, burnt out and vanished, but the effects are set. Not enough births. Not enough people. And in the meantime, the rest of the galaxy is being torn to bits in the fighting between the Replicators and a freak Goa’uld called Anubis.” Jade sighed heavily. “My father… The Commander… He figured out that we couldn’t win, no matter what we did.”
Jack felt a cold sense of understanding settle on him. “The only way to make it right is to stop it from happening.”
Another nod. “Mirris used the Pack as carriers for the pathogen. The treaty, the trade agreement, that was the back door for the Aschen attack. The Pack never even knew it. We think she’d turned someone in their hierarchy, but we never found out who.”
