The klaxons abruptly fell silent and the main lights—those that hadn't shattered—came back on. The injured airman started thrashing around under Jack's hand, which resulted in another crimson spray. Rapidly repositioning his grip to stem the flow, Jack injected considerably more calm into his voice than he felt right now, and said, “Got a little leak, here, son, so you need to hold still till the doc arrives.”
Panicked eyes met his, but the two stars on Jack's shoulder carried an authority that held more weight than words alone. The airman's breathing hitched as he made a conscious effort to calm himself, then he took in Jack's blood-soaked face and chest, and mumbled, “Sorry, sir.”
The clump of boots running down metal steps signaled the arrival of the medical team. Jack's gaze remained glued to the kid's, his mind rummaging through an assortment of possibilities, all bad. “No sweat, son. Needed dry-cleaning anyway. First time you've been injured?” He glanced around when Lam squatted beside him.
“Ye...es,sir.”
“Purple Heart, cool scar, and you'll probably be back at work tomorrow morning.” Subject to there being a morning. Not that Jack was a pessimist or anything, but the odor of fried electrics, hot metal, chemical flame retardant and blood was tinged with the familiar bouquet of impending doom. The Ori, Dark Side Ascendeds, were making the Goa'uld look like rank amateurs when it came to galactic domination. Actually, interglactic domination, because the Ori had already set themselves up with a bunch of happy, dedicated followers in another galaxy, and now had their sites set on the Milky Way in what appeared to be an ongoing squabble with the not-quite-so Dark Side but nevertheless irritating Ancients.
Nothing like an intergalactic, inter-dimensional war to screw up his retirement plans. And just when he'd discovered that there really were fish in his pond.
Lam whipped out a set of forceps, an instrument that Jack had become personally acquainted with on several occasions, and nodded for him to release his hand. The kid tried to suppress a cry when the doc took a moment to dig around the wound before getting a firm grip on the artery. Jack gave the airman's shoulder a brief, reassuring squeeze then hoisted himself to his feet and peered down into the 'gate room. “How long before the 'gate is—son of a...”
“Could be some time, sir.” The edge to Walter's voice had taken on a vaguely resigned tone. “For a moment there, just as it shut down, the Stargate seemed to, well, disappear. When it reappeared...”
Walter didn't have to elaborate. The Stargate had rotated about twenty degrees left and was pitched forward at an alarming angle. The only thing that appeared to be stopping it from completely falling over was the crumpled mass of metal that had once been the ramp.
It looked as if something had reached through the worm-hole, grabbed the mesh, metal sheeting and the .50 cal machine guns that normally flanked the 'gate and balled them together like used aluminum foil.
Of more concern was the half closed iris. On the plus side, from what Jack could make out, the Marines stationed inside the 'gate room were unharmed, and armed reinforcements were already arriving. “Injuries?”
“Minor cuts and bruises, but nothing bad, sir.” Walter reached behind himself, brought his chair upright and sat down, glancing across at the young airman being loaded onto a stretcher. “At least in the 'gate room.”
Jack studied the situation for a moment longer. Sergeant Siler and the newest member of the SGC, Vala Mal Doran, were down in the 'gate room futzing around with the manual iris mechanism. Okay, all in all things weren't so bad. For one thing, they still had a 'gate. “All right—”
The Stargate groaned, tipped another few inches, and then began to dial. “That's not me!” Walter declared, his fingers tapping furiously at the still dead keyboard.
“Get that iris shut—wow!” Jack shouted above the renewed blare of klaxons.
“Sir, the iris mechanism is damaged!” Siler turned and looked up at Jack. “There's no way we can get it closed.”
Which left Jack with only one, gut wrenching option. “Code Red. Lock down the base,” he ordered Walter. “And get those backup systems online.”
Behind them, orderlies were lifting the injured airman onto a stretcher. Jack caught Lam's white-coated arm as she turned to leave. “Not you, Doctor. I need you to insert your command codes.”
Her eyes blanked for a moment before widening in comprehension. She twisted out of his grip; turned and stared through the shattered Plexiglas. “Are you serious?”
Jack didn't have the time to point out that the SGC could not risk the arrival of another Ori bioweapon, not after the thousands who had died last year. Standing orders left him no choice.
In the room below, Vala and Siler dived clear as a narrow vortex of boiling white erupted from the three-foot wide aperture that remained, disintegrating a chunk of mangled ramp before snapping back into place. It was small comfort to realize any Prior who took it into his baldy, self-righteous head to wander through the 'gate right about now would end up losing the lower half of his body to the wrong side of the iris. And as appealing as that notion was, while the titanium leaves of the iris remained even partially open, Earth was vulnerable to attack.
“Systems online, sir,” Walter announced, grim-faced.
Siler was staring up at Jack, shaking his head, while Vala continued to pound away at the manual iris mechanism. Jack admired her tenacity, but it was too late. Beside him, Lam stood frozen and wide-eyed. He understood her hesitation but he hadn't asked her to become the Chief Medical Officer of Stargate Command because she was General Landry's daughter.
Or maybe he had. 'Wow, Doctor,” he said, with just enough emphasis to be heard over a new round of bleating klaxons. Walter moved his chair back to give Lam access to the one functioning keyboard in the control room.
Her lips compressed into a tiny moue, Lam's nostrils flared as she sucked in deep breaths, controlling an emotion to which Jack had never been able to give a name. Worse for Caroline Lam. Her profession dictated she do no harm. Detonating a nuke that would, in the first instance, take out the fifteen hundred men and woman who worked in Cheyenne Mountain, and then God knew how many in the fallout, kind of fell outside that mandate. She nodded stiffly, bent and typed in her password and then backed away from the console like it was some sort of virulent pathogen.
Fingers steady, Jack typed in his code, wondering if this really was the last time he was going to have to do this. Several drops of the airman's semi-coagulated blood fell from his head onto the keys. Landry was going to be pissed when he woke from surgery and found out that Jack had vaporized his command—and his daughter.
“Sir, it's SG-l's IDC!” The relief in Walter's voice was tinged with incredulity.
“Are you certain?” Jack paused mid-stroke, stared at the monitor and felt his guts unclench at the red 'verified' that flashed onscreen.
Walter took over the keyboard, double-checking the input. “Yes, sir!”
Excellent! That feeling of averting doom once again just never grew old. “Open the iris.”
The sergeant's quick grin vanished when he repeatedly slapped his hand on the palm scanner and nothing happened. The aperture of the iris remained fixed at two thirds closed, and an entirely different kind of tension gripped Jack. Leaning forward, he yelled down through the shattered window to Siler, “Get that iris open!”
Vala threw up her hands, glaring up at him impatiently. “Would you make up your mind?”
Ignoring her exasperation, Jack directed his next order to Walter. “Warn SG-1 not to commence 'gate travel—”
A greasy metallic sound cut through the noise. “Not us, sir!” Siler shouted in response to the iris folding back into the framework supporting the 'gate.
“Definitely not us,” Vala called, stepping away from the mechanism with her hands upraised—this time, defensively. “Honestly!”
“Me neither, sir,” announced Walter. “And sir, I double checked the point of origin. The signal is not coming from any known 'gate address.�
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Crap. The self-destruct option had just reappeared on the daily planner. He recommenced typing in his code when a familiar voice called from below, “It's okay, Jack. We're not Ori.”
Two apparently unarmed people had stepped through the 'gate and stood balanced on a piece of twisted framework. One of them was a short pudgy guy in a neatly pressed double-breasted pinstriped suit, tie and silk waistcoat. The other was wearing an Air Force uniform with three stars on the shoulder and a chest full of medals.
Jack was starting to wonder if he'd hit his head harder than he first thought when General Carter turned her gaze to him and smiled.
CHAPTER THREE
“Close the...” Cam just managed to stop himself from colliding with Teal'c, who was standing at the top of the ramp, staring up at the empty control room. “Whoa!”
Daniel pulled up short beside him. “Uh oh.”
Before Cam could request more intel on the exact nature of uh oh, the 'gate room kind of fizzled out like a mirage, the light fading and the walls compressing around them.
“What the hell!” He switched on the light attached to his P-90 and looked around. “At the risk of taking a page out of General O'Neill's book, I get the feeling we're not in Kansas, anymore. Not Bayou or the SGC, either, I'm guessing.”
“Uhm... Sam? I thought you'd fixed that.” The hesitation in Daniel's voice was less than reassuring.
Cam raked the darkness with his P-90. They were in a cavern. A very, very small cavern from what he could see, although it was hard to tell, what with a bulky Jaffa crammed against him on one side and Jackson on the other. He could just make out Sam's frowning face, pressed up against Jackson's pack.
“Fixed what?” Cam asked, trying not to breathe too deeply. The bouquet of Bayou they'd brought with them was thick inside the confines of whatever in hell they were in.
His butt was stinging, too, from all those little pricks he'd taken on his way to the 'gate, and his ripped face hurt like hell, not to mention he was dripping blood onto his P-90.
Squinting, Daniel pulled off his gunk-splattered glasses and looked around. “The solar flare thing.”
“What solar flare thing?”
Teal'c, whose head was angled awkwardly to fit into the confined space, was, for a rare change, more forthcoming. “I believe Daniel Jackson is referring to the time we were inadvertently sent to 1969.”
“That Code 30185 joke's dead in the water, guys.” Cam sneezed. The air was so dammed thick his eyes were starting to water. “You can give it up, now.”
“He's not joking, Cam,” Sam said, her voice no more reassuring than Daniel's had been. “Not this time.”
“Well I read that file and I'm telling ya, that—” Cam prodded the ceiling of the cave with his P-90— “is not the butt end of a Titan missile.”
“I don't think this was caused by a solar flare sending us back in time.” Sam twisted around and ran her hand, sliced and bloodied from the Bayou projectiles, down the rock wall. “And I don't think it's a black hole generated quantum shifting, either. Either we were diverted elsewhere and what we saw was an illusion, or we have gone back in time, in which case it must be prior to 1961.”
The year that excavation work began on Cheyenne Mountain. Great. “Any way to tell how far back we might have been thrown?”
Sam shook her head. “No.”
“How about the why? So we can start doing something to get out of this... this place?”
“Maybe it was those staff weapons the Priors were shooting at us as we went through the 'gate,” Daniel suggested. Blood was streaming down the side of his face, too, from where one of the dartballs had nicked his temple.
Cam resisted the temptation to groan out loud. He hated it when his bad feelings turned out to be right, which, come to think of it, was most of the time.
“No way of knowing for sure without analyzing the energy pattern.” Sam's hand fell away, and she played the beam of light around the rest of the cavern until it settled on a glass smooth circular section of rock at one end. Her breath caught, and Cam didn't think it was entirely due to the increasingly rancid smell when she added, “But theoretically that might be enough.”
“So, we got slimed and the beams got crossed. On the plus side, there's no sign of Gozer.” Cam wasn't going to pretend he cared how a couple of beams of energy entering a worm-hole on one planet, could send them back in time on Earth to where the 'gate would be sometime in the future, but wasn't here anymore. “How do we get out?”
Sam's expression warned him he wasn't going to like what he was about to hear. “We can't.”
Nope. Definitely did not want to hear that.
“Oh c'mon.” He smiled, just to let her know he was in on the joke. “We got in here, right? There has to be a way out.” Using his light, he hunted around for a crack in the roof of the cave while beside him Teal'c examined the ground.
“I don't think so.” Sam waved her P-90 around, indicating the oddly familiar shape of the cave. “Notice the way the rock has been carved out? This was formed by the vortex when the 'gate opened.”
“So where's the 'gate now?” Cam tapped the smooth end of the rock.
“Still in 2006. Before I joined the SGG, the Pentagon had me researching the Stargate as a possible time travel device because of the naquadah's unique temporal properties. Under the right circumstances the 'gate can create a temporal field around itself.”
“Which is what happened when we went back to 1969,” Daniel added.
“Right. Because the 'gate and point of origin was fixed in our time we saw a brief echo, like a window, into the SGC. When the wormhole disengaged, so did the temporal field, leaving the 'gate fixed in its own time.”
Cam distinctly remembered his eyes glazing over that section of the report. “So you're saying the same thing's happened here?”
“Not exactly, otherwise we would have arrived in Bayou at a different time.”
“Perhaps that is what the Ori intended,” Teal'c said.
“I think maybe you're right, Teal'c but...” Sam hesitated. “It's almost as if the wormhole and our energy signal were diverted when we were in transit. Even if the SGC do figure out what happened by analyzing the data stream, and how to dial in to this exact co-ordinate in space-time, any incoming wormhole would disintegrate us before it stabilized.”
Oh, was that all? “Okay, well, there has to be some other way out of here. How far is it to the surface?” Cam tapped the rock overhead with the muzzle of his P-90.
“Um... if we're in what will one day be the 'gate room? About twenty eight stories.” Daniel lowered himself to the newly carved ground, pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Straight up. At, say, ten feet per story, not counting the supporting structure between the floors, that's, what? Three hundred feet give or take? A hundred yards?”
“A hundred yards? That's not much.”
“Through solid granite.” Sam eased off her pack and winced when she slumped down beside him. If she'd taken as many of those darts that Cam had collected in his ass, he knew exactly how she felt.
“Maybe the radio?” He patted the switch on his pocket, but all he got back was feedback from his teammates' com units, followed by unremitting static.
It was hot in here, as well as smelly and cramped. Sam smeared the blood on her face as she wiped away the sweat beading on her brow. “There's no way of knowing if we went back fifty years or fifty thousand.”
Cam frowned. Now he was really starting to worry. Sam sounded as defeated as he'd ever heard her, and seeing them all crouched in this tiny space, bleeding from countless small punctures, wasn't exactly inspirational, either. “Well, this has got to be the stupidest way to die I've ever heard of. Stuck in the middle of Cheyenne Mountain, probably before we were even born, in...how long did you say we had?”
“In an area this size?” Sam coughed and then cleared her throat. “Minutes, at the most.”
“On the bright side,” Daniel said, his eyes water
ing, “at least we won't have to put up with this stench for much longer.”
Cam looked around again, as if a miracle might have presented itself in the minute or so since he last looked, certain of only one thing—stench or no stench, he did not want to give the Ori the satisfaction of him dying like this.
CHAPTER FOUR
The stranger who'd stepped through the 'gate was looking around uncertainly, gripping a section of mangled Stargate ramp, while General Carter carefully balanced on part of the gun turret. The event horizon fizzled into nonexistence as the Stargate shut down behind them, but the klaxons continued to bleat. Ignoring the objections from his knees, Jack took the steps from the control room down to the corridor two at a time, calling over his shoulder, “Walter, shut that thing damn off, will ya?”
Stargate - SG-1 - 09 - Roswell Page 2