“Like we had sooo much luck the last coupla times,” Jack muttered. “Hey, Loki, any of your buddies hanging around the skies over New England?”
“Our ship was the only vessel currently authorized to be in Earth's orbit at that time.”
“Authorized. Right,” Jack mumbled. “That anything like sanctioned?”
As they continued to ascend, a sliver of red-gold across the horizon transformed into a brilliant burst of sunlight. Jack rotated the jumper and headed southwest, while maintaining their rate of climb.
“That should be high enough,” said Sam a short time later. “Now remember, three hundred years back, then—”
Something shifted, a fleeting sense of movement and an odd internal sensation that Daniel could not quite define. Below, the night view of Earth appeared...different. Darker, that was it. “When are we?”
“Thought we could maybe take a few hours off, head due south and watch the Santa Maria sail in,” Jack replied.
Daniel released his breath. For the first time since they'd left for Bayou some twelve hours earlier, he could relax. Whatever was happening in 1908 was now on hold, frozen in time until they could go back for Mitchell and Vala.
Jack's words also triggered something else, a realization that they could indeed travel across time at will to witness firsthand events that had shaped their world. The prospect of substantiating countless theories, and debunking countless more, was intensely seductive.
And yet, one easy to resist, for their brief experiences had shown them that while they could travel at will, it was not with impunity.
“Sir?”
“Don't panic, Carter,” Jack replied. “I just picked a date instead of some random point in time, that's all.”
“I was just going to say that the power readings are fluctuating. We need to make the second jump while we still can.” Shaking her head, she added, “I just wish I'd been able to get the cloak operational.”
Acknowledging her concerns, Daniel said, “Sam, there were so many UFO sightings that week, even if we do contribute to them I doubt it will matter.”
The fleeting, indefinite sensation occurred again. A familiar stream of light encompassed the seat beside Daniel's—and Loki vanished.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Maybe he should just think about retiring, this time for good. He really should have seen this coming—or in the case of Loki, going.
While Jack was certain that his ribs weren't actually busted, he still felt like he'd just gone fifteen rounds with a bad-tempered Jaffa. He shouldn't be complaining, he supposed. If the sticky mass on his scalp was anything to go by, some of his brains had leaked out before Vala had done her thing with the Goa'uld hand device. Of course, being healed by any sort of Goa'uld technology always left a bad taste in his mouth. But beggars really couldn't afford to be choosers. And, truth be told, if he'd been asked to take his pick between living and dying—which he hadn't, because he'd been, well, dying—other than agreeing to have a snake shoved inside of him, it was a fairly safe bet he'd have chosen the former.
“Well that was a shock,” Daniel remarked, staring, like Jack, at the space where Loki had been sitting only a few moments ago.
“Dammit!” Carter yanked out her laptop and reconnected the interface. “Sir, did you—?
“2006, twenty-four hours after we left.”
“Jack?” Daniel said.
“You think for one minute I'd take us to 1947 and let Loki futz around with this ship any more than he has?” Jack said.
“So that little charade about not bumping into anything in the skies of 1947—”
“Was for Loki's benefit,” Carter replied. “He must have over-ridden the thought interface and set it to specific dates.”
“What happened, Carter?” Jack asked, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “How could he just beam out like that?”
Carter winced and shrugged helplessly, which wasn't something she did often. “His ship's automated medical systems would likely have been scanning for him and beamed him aboard the moment they detected his beacon when we—”
A puff of smoke followed by the familiar stench of fried crystals wafting from the time machine cut her off mid-sentence. She shoved the laptop aside, lunged out of her chair heading to the rear of the jumper. “Why that treacherous little...”
Teal'c was already on it, with a fire extinguisher in hand.
“Wait, Teal'c!” Carter warned. “Chemical flame retardant will just make it harder to repair.”
“And a fire in here will make it a whole lot harder to breathe,” Jack pointed out, his attention divided between the time machine and their position in orbit. “Get it under control.”
Teal'c exchanged the extinguisher for a thermal blanket.
Ignoring Carter's earlier admonishment to conserve power, Jack activated the HUD. What he saw did not inspire him with confidence. The only moving blip on the screen, presumably the Asgard vessel, was already accelerating out of orbit.
“Sir, we have to catch that ship,” Carter called from the rear. “Otherwise we could be stranded here in 1947.”
“Assuming this is 1947,” Daniel said, leaning over Jack's shoulder to scan the planet below.
Jack brought the jumper around just in time to see the Asgard ship vanish inside a glowy spider-web hyperspace portal, certain he knew where—or rather when—they were. “Oh, it's 1947 all right, otherwise that skinny-assed Dr. Mengele wannabe wouldn't be high-tailing it outta here.”
While Jack was the first to admit he was no intellectual giant, he knew when he'd been had—a feeling he'd had, more or less, since the moment General Carter had walked into the control room back in the SGC. This just confirmed it. He turned in his chair just fast enough to be reminded that his ribs felt like crap. “Carter?”
Abandoning what now looked more like a char-grill than a piece of Ancient technology, she came forward, leaving Teal'c and Daniel to beat out the remains of the fire the old fashioned way. “Sir, the time machine's power supply module and operating unit are completely burned out.”
“Then I take it the answer to my next question is no?”
“If your next question is 'does this mean if the temporary relay to the jumper's drive systems fails, we'll lose all ancillary systems?' then the answer is yes, sir.”
“Actually, Carter, I was going to ask if you—or the other you—thought to pack some lunch.”
Carter didn't seem to appreciate his attempt at levity. Instead, she opened the panel on the Asgard transport. The stream of un-Carter-like invectives that followed left Jack in no doubt about what she thought of that superior little snake-skinned pest, Loki, and his dodgy wiring.
“When you say ancillary systems,” asked Daniel. “You don't mean things like the HUD and anti-grav, do you?”
“I mean everything. Anti-grav, life support, shields—every system in the jumper. Maybe not all at once, but that opal isn't going to last for long. We're going to have to land—sooner rather than later—so I can salvage what I can and reconfigure the systems.”
Daniel collapsed back into his seat behind Jack; his shoulders slumped. “I should have seen this coming. No, wait, I did see it coming, it's just that with leaving Vala and Mitchell behind—”
“Daniel, let it go.” Jack turned back to the controls. He'd heard the guilt, the self-recrimination in Daniel's voice. It was the same guilt Jack had been forced to deal with years ago. Command was like being fed a set of minnow hooks. They curled up inside your stomach just waiting to unfold and dig in the moment you made a decision that sent anyone into harm's way. The first time someone under his command had died, the hooks had acquired double barbs. These days, he was pretty darned certain they'd land a good-sized shark.
That path led to going not so slowly crazy. Decisions were often made in the heat of battle. Sometime they were good. Sometimes they weren't. You just had to find a way to deal with them.
If you didn't find a way to deal with them, they would end up tearing y
ou apart— which brought him back to the whole thinking about retiring thing again.
Carter, who was standing over her laptop, said, “Sir, I recommend you take us down using minimal power for ancillary systems, including inertial dampeners, and making only minor adjustments to any controls. It'll take longer but we can't risk overloading the power relays.” Sliding back into the seat beside him, she began poking around inside the guts of the Asgard transport device. “I don't know as much about Asgard beaming technology as I'd like.”
From behind her, Teal'c said, “O'Neill, did you not earlier state that General Carter requested you recover an Asgard named An from this time?”
It was night outside. Jack concentrated his thoughts on not bumping into anything on the way down. The jumper's collision avoidance technology had failed spectacularly when it came to time travel. Hopefully it worked better during normal operations, without sucking up too much power. “Yeah, except General Carter was a little short on the details, and the only Asgard ship around just took off for galaxies unknown.”
“Sir, if you'd known what was going to happen, you might have inadvertently avoided the Ha'tak, in which case Ra might have invaded Earth in 1908.”
“Care to theorize what leaving behind Mitchell and Vala achieved?” Despite what he'd just said to Daniel, Jack made no attempt to keep the anger from his voice. He still couldn't figure out whether General Carter had come back in time knowing that they'd successfully retrieved An, or hoping they'd succeed, thereby altering a small snippet in history. He personally didn't give a damned either way—except that he'd been forced to leave people behind. He didn't want an explanation; he wanted a solution.
After a moment's pause in which Carter's face went through several interesting contortions, she said, “Exactly what did I... General Carter, say about An, sir?”
Jack concentrated on keeping the jumper level. All right for Carter to say use minimal power on the inertial dampers, but it wasn't as easy as it sounded, not thinking about using power. “That he vanished after an accident damaged his ship, and they think he died.”
“Which,” Daniel said, “we now know was our doing.”
“Loki was injured and his ship put him into a medical pod—”
“Which is apparently what's just happened.”
“Daniel who's telling this story?”
“Sorry. I was just...you know.”
Yeah, he knew. Daniel was no more letting it go than Jack could. “Heimdall was going over Loki's files when she—”
“She?” Carter piped up.
“Seems the Asgard like to be genderized now.”
Carter winced. “Really? I wonder if I've ever offended them?”
“Colonel, do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry, sir. It's just that Thor has always maintained the Asgard were never detected in all their visits to Earth.”
“Yeah, well, he stopped maintaining that after I gave him a souvenir from Roswell.”
“You did?” Carter was staring at him, he could tell even without looking. “What was it?”
“I believe it was the same as you gave me, O'Neill,” Teal'c called from the rear.
“Couple of sizes smaller,” Jack reminded him.
“Jack?” Daniel's voice was definitely accusatory. “What was it?”
“Just a T-shirt.”
“You bought Thor a T-shirt?” Carter said, not attempting to hide the incredulity in her voice.
“With the logo, I am an alien beneath a photograph of an Asgard,” Teal'c explained.
“Hey, he liked it!” Jack said quickly. “Anyway, Thor and Heimdall did some checking. They matched the dates to An's disappearance, and figured Loki used what presumably was us banging into their ship as an opportunity for a little academic advancement.”
“Y'know,” said Daniel, “I recall some story about the Air Force recovering several bodies from the Roswell crash. And they later claimed they were test dummies?”
“Army” Carter corrected, glancing between the HUD and her laptop. “The Air Force wasn't a separate wing of the military until August 1947.”
“I believe they recovered three bodies,” Teal'c amended. “And two survivors, one of whom died at the Roswell Army Air Field hospital soon after arrival.”
Eyes wide, Carter turned in her seat and stared at him.
“I have read a great deal about the Roswell incident,” Teal'c added. “While sources appear largely unreliable, there is nevertheless some consistency.”
“Now, see, this just proves my point to the comptroller squadron that we need our subscription to the National Enquirer.” At their current rate of descent they could be on the ground in four minutes. Seven if he cut back on the inertial dampeners and diverted power to the HUD, which, under the circumstances, was preferable. Streaks of pink across the eastern horizon warned Jack that the sun would be up real soon, and they needed to find a place to land other than smack bang in the middle of miles and miles of nothing but rocks and sand.
Carter was still engrossed in whatever she'd removed from the transport device. “An was a genetic engineer running experiments,” she said. “He was probably carrying blank Asgard clones. But even an Asgard ship, or in this case, parts of one, would have burned up during an uncontrolled reentry.”
“Some reports from 1947 indicate that several ships similar in design to powered Asgard escape pods were involved in maneuvers, possibly even a pursuit of one another,” Teal'c said from behind.
“That would explain the bodies,” Daniel replied thoughtfully. “Although it's interesting that there's no mention of casualties or wreckage in any of the classified Pentagon documents we were given.”
“C'mon, Daniel,” Jack retorted, scanning the landscape for somewhere to put down. “Fifty years from now some poor sap is gonna be sifting through Pentagon files on the Stargate. program and find they're missing half the planets we visited. Probably a galaxy or three by then, too.”
With very little effort, he was able to fine-tune the HUD to display several data outputs simultaneously, including a three-dimensional terrain matrix, variable heat sources differentiating human and animals from artificial, and the density and nature of vegetation and buildings. Despite the dire nature of the situation they were in—what with messing with timelines and being stranded in the past and all—a part of Jack couldn't help feeling a thrill of anticipation. This technology was a combat pilot's ultimate wish list. With the Ancient gene therapy running at fifty percent success rate, the concept was already being considered for the next generation of hybrid fighters. “Carter, any particular bit of sagebrush you want me to land behind?”
“He beamed himself out.”
That was unsettling. Jack did not like to hear overtones of disbelief in Carter's voice.
“I've just checked the log—it's about the only thing that isn't damaged. Loki's ship didn't automatically beam him out. He repaired this—” Carter tapped the scanner and turned to Daniel. “And then he set it to beam himself back to his ship, deliberately overloading it so it would bum out, once he was gone.”
Carter didn't have to say the rest. But for Loki, they could have retrieved Mitchell and Vala. Even with his back turned, Jack could feel Daniel's simmering rage.
He wasn't feeling too charitable himself at the moment. Next time he laid eyes on Loki, Jack decided, diplomatic fallout be damned, he was going to stuff that supercilious little puny-assed weasel into a glass jar, fill it with embalming fluid, and donate it to the Smithsonian.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Daniel Jackson's dark countenance was familiar to Teal'c, and for a fleeting moment he regretted the decision he'd made in requesting Vala's assistance in restoring Loki's breathing. But it was also true that the future had yet to unfold. Despite O'Neill's evident mistrust of General Carter's motivations, Teal'c was confident that she would not have acted dishonorably.
Visibly taking control of her anger, Colonel Carter said, “Teal'c, I know there's no way to b
e certain what actually happened, but what other rumors are there regarding the survivors of the Roswell crash?”
While Teal'c had always considered the stories to be nothing more than amusing entertainment, it was now evident that some aspects were indeed factual. “One account suggests that the sole survivor lived in a secret facility in Washington DC for ten years. The majority of the stories, however, agree that he either died in the Roswell Army Air Field base hospital or was killed by on over-zealous soldier.”
Colonel Carter took a moment to consider his words before responding. “According to the log, Vala locked onto four signals—ours—then just before beaming us out, she confirmed a fifth indistinct signal. There appears to have been either a ghosting of that signal, which she could have easily mistaken for a weak Doppler shift, but I've just analyzed it and it's a distinct, sixth signal.” Her gaze took in O'Neill, Daniel and Teal'c. “Sir, that could be An. If I'm right, he's still aboard the crashed escape pod.”
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