Relativity

by Stargate

  “Yeah,” Jack made a face, “Well, I voted for that Martin Sheen guy.”

  Hammond cleared his throat, interceding before the conversation went any further. “We’re going to begin preparations for a signing of the treaty here, at Stargate Command,” he said. “Suj has already communicated with their ship, the Wanderer, and Vix has agreed in principle. But she wants to meet with the Vice President informally first. I’ve asked Doctor Jackson to join us as well.” He nodded at O’Neill. “And she wants you to be present, Colonel.”

  “Really?” Jack couldn’t resist flashing a smile at Kinsey. “That should be interesting.”

  As the colonel expected, Hammond’s statement wiped the smug look right off the politician’s face. “I didn’t approve that. Jackson I can accept, as his expertise might have some minor application during the discussion, but him?” He jerked a thumb at the colonel. “General, you are the chosen representative of the SGC, and that should be made clear to this woman. O’Neill is surplus to requirements.”

  “That’s harsh, Kinsey.” Jack touched his chest in an oh-you-wound-me gesture. “You know how much fun we have when we get together… And I’d never miss the chance to keep an eye on you.” He leaned closer and patted the other man on the shoulder. “And Suj? You’re gonna get on like a house on fire with her. She’s all the things you don’t like: she’s smart, opinionated, direct.” Jack glanced up at the general. “Hey, do you think we could sell tickets?”

  All the new arrivals got back on the long blue bus after passing through processing at the outbuilding on the perimeter of Cheyenne Mountain AFB, and it rolled away along the winding road toward the base proper. Jade sat in a window seat near the back of the vehicle, her chin propped on her wrist and her nose close to the glass. All the colors seemed so striking; the browns and greens of the trees, the perfect powder blue of the sky, the clean whiteness of the sparse clouds. She found it hard to connect her own experiences of Earth with the world she watched passing by outside. She felt dislocated by the differences, almost as if it were all something unreal, an illusion.

  She brushed a length of black hair from her eyes and tucked it under her uniform hat. Jade’s life had always been one of conflict, of running and fighting, an existence built on the pain of what she had lost. But now all around her, she saw people and lives brimming with so much, and it made her heart ache. On the way from the city, out past the streets and the teeming masses, she couldn’t help but be shocked by the sheer numbers of the people. They looked well-fed and unworried, going to and fro on the errands of their lives; they were laughing and eating and talking and living, and they showed no signs of fear. They were, for want of a better description, so very ordinary; and Jade realized as she watched them pass her by that she envied them. None of them had any comprehension about what was out there, about the magnitude of threats that they lived beneath every day. None of them understood how tissue-thin their comfortable existence really was, they didn’t know how easy it would be to have it all taken away from them. To lose everything they loved. To find their world in ashes. If only I could be like you, she told them, if only I could live in ignorance, unlearn all the terrible things I know. Jade wanted to yank open the window and shout at them, warn them about how precious it all was, tell them to be grateful. To be ready.

  Only once in a while did she see anyone who looked like the kind of men and women she had grown up with. She glimpsed them in doorways, or huddled in alleys where they could stay out of the cold. Disheveled people with the feral look of a lifetime survivor, whose lives were nothing but conflict, day after day. People like her father.

  As it always did, the thought of her parents lit the cold fire deep inside her. She knew that she should remain focused and undistracted, but being here pulled at her calm, set her off-balance more than she had expected it to. She thought of her mother, of her kind face and her warmth, and not for the first time she wondered how her father would have been if she had lived. His words to Jade, as she gathered her gear in the kitchen of the house they’d appropriated, had been terse.

  “Stay on-mission, do whatever you have to. Get the job done. This is the last chance we have, girl. No going back now.”

  His craggy, lined face was set and firm, but she could see the lie of it. No-one else, not Ite-kh, not Tekka or Sebe’c, knew him well enough to see through the veneer of the old man’s gruff façade; no-one but Jade. Coming back here to Earth had stirred up memories in the Commander that he was forcing away, dark and troubled thoughts that she saw at the edges of his eyes. She knew he would never speak of them. He was too damn stubborn, too bitter at life to show it that sort of weakness.

  Jade shook off the grim train of thought and glanced down at the USAF uniform she wore. It was new and freshly pressed, and she felt uncomfortable in it; but no-one would have known that to look at her. Jade was adept at hiding her real emotions deep beneath a false mask. It was why she was one of the best operatives in the Holdfast.

  The bus turned and rumbled over the spike strip that marked the inner perimeter of the base. Jade craned her neck to see the blunt tooth of rust-colored stone that was Cheyenne Mountain rising up before her.

  “You new to the facility?” said a voice. She glanced forward found herself looking at a Lieutenant Colonel with a smooth grin on his lips, sitting in the seat in front of hers. He smelled of cologne. He eyed her rank tabs. “Major…?”

  “Wells,” she lied, dropping smoothly into the Middle American accent her cover demanded. “Hannah Wells. I’ve just transferred in from Germany.”

  “Tom Richter,” he said, the grin widening. “Welcome back to the US of A. I bet you’re glad to be home, huh? I’d swap bratwurst for steaks any day of the week.”

  She studied the insignia on his jacket. “You’re with Strategic Air Command?”

  “And you’re a doctor.” He nodded, as if he was approving her. “In all my years in this man’s Air Force I’ve never had a physical from someone as good-looking as you, Major.”

  “Just unlucky, I guess.”

  “Maybe my luck will change?” Jade was starting to get annoyed by his grinning and the man’s oily attempts at charm. “As you’re new in town, I could recommend a great place to eat. Perhaps we could—”

  “Are you hitting on me, Colonel?” The bus turned into the tunnel and suddenly they were inside the mountain.

  “Am I?” He chuckled. “I always think fraternization gets a bad rap. And as we’re probably going to be working together—”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “I’m not transferring to NORAD. I’m with the other program.”

  His manner changed instantly and he leaned back. “Oh. You’re with those folks down in the pit, huh?” He nodded at the floor. “Project Star-Gate?” Richter sniffed disdainfully. “What the hell is that, anyhow? Something about astronomy?” Richter’s lip curled into a sneer. “I heard wild stories, like you got a bunch of psychics in there, tracking down flying saucers, or some other sci-fi crap.”

  The bus halted and the other passengers rose to get off. Jade leaned closer to the officer and whispered in his ear. “It’s all to do with magnets. I can’t say any more than that.”

  The duty orders she had taken from the real Major Hannah Wells told Jade to proceed to a waiting area designated by a red line on the floor. She followed the signs, passing through vast steel doors and multiple chambers designed to protect the inner spaces of the mountain from a direct nuclear strike. There was one last security check, and she casually dropped her duty bag on the conveyor for the x-ray machine before stepping up to a flat slab the size of a household door. There were armed men in the room, each cradling a P90 submachine gun; and more discreetly, they also had sealed oval holsters that looked decidedly non-standard issue. Jade didn’t have to see inside them to know they held Goa’uld zat’ni’katels. The guards, and the other people on duty in the security room, were ostensibly dressed in nondescript military fatigues. It was only the presence of two unusual p
atches on their shoulders that set them aside from the other USAF staff on the base. Jade glimpsed the Stargate symbol for Earth on the insignia and tried not to be obvious about it.

  A non-commissioned officer with glasses looked up from a clipboard to Jade and the handful of other people waiting for final processing. “If I can have your attention please. I’m Sergeant Siler, and I’ll be your guide today. If you can let me have your identity papers and orders we’ll get this all put through ASAP.” He beckoned the man in front of Jade. “Go ahead and stand in front of the scanner there, sir.”

  The officer did as he was asked. They had made a good job of making the scanning device look relatively unremarkable, but Jade knew that inside it were sensors that did much more than just look for concealed weapons or explosives. Then it was her turn, and she glanced at the x-ray tunnel as her bag went through it. Like the scanner, she had no doubt the device did much more than just peer through plastic and metal; but the problem about having countermeasures was that someone who knew how they worked could counter them. A small device, originally of Ancient origin, was sewn into the lining of Jade’s bag and it would make the contents appear to be nothing but clothes, some toiletries and a few papers. In reality, the bag had a false compartment that concealed items of hardware which originated from worlds all over the galactic disc. A similar masking device was threaded into Jade’s hat, blotting out the semi-organic masses of her implant and the nanite colonies inside her bones. Moment of truth, she told herself. If she set off the alarms here, the whole mission would be blown before they were even started. The scanner began to hum. Of course, there were other ways into Cheyenne Mountain, hidden access channels and vents that studded the hillside for miles around, but those were just as uncertain in their own way. Impersonating Major Wells was a high risk, high reward option, and as the Commander had said, they were way past the time for the cautious approach.

  The scanner made a soft pinging sound and Siler beckoned her forward. “Thank you, major,” he said, with a brief smile. “Why don’t you head over to the elevator bank and I’ll take you down for orientation.”

  It was only as Jade gathered up her bag from the other end of the x-ray tunnel that she allowed herself to relax a little. Very gently, she brushed a fingertip over a spot behind her right ear, bringing her implant back out of its dormant state to full operational capacity. She had only a few moments to send a signal; once they descended into the SGC, opportunities for communication would become much more sporadic and far more likely to be detected. The implant sent a pulse of warmth through her skin, and she sensed the faint static of the comlink through the bones of her skull.

  Status? The Commander’s question was blunt and thick with emotion; she could feel it leaking into the esper nanites in her brain tissue.

  “I’m in,” said Jade in a whisper. Siler was approaching, the last of the checks complete.

  She expected the link to be severed immediately, but instead the old man spoke again. Good luck, Jade. And then she was alone.

  “Step inside, major,” said the sergeant as the elevator doors opened. “Trust me, ma’am, you don’t want to take the stairs.”

  Carter nibbled on the sandwich with one hand and manipulated the mouse with another, working the display on her computer to separate the levels of energy distribution into their component parts. To anyone without several degrees in physics, quantum mechanics and a bunch of other related disciplines, the screen would have looked like little more than digitally generated snapshots of a rippling sea, layered one over the top of another; to Sam, they were instantly recognizable as the variant strains of particles given off by the Stargate during its normal modes of operation. Boson interactions rendered in green, neutrinos in blue, white for tau-mesons, red for chronitons… She knew the play and rhythm of energies through the gate as well as she did the words to her favorite song— which was Strawberry Fields Forever, although she didn’t often sing it— and so it irritated her when she saw them out of balance without a concrete, discernable reason.

  She sighed. There was still so much they didn’t know about how the Stargates worked. Construction, for starters— how had the Ancients managed to fabricate the rings out of that weird quasi-metal naquadah? How was it even possible for the gates to gather enough power to open an interstellar wormhole, let alone maintain an event horizon and hold the things rigid? By any conventional wisdom, it would take more energy than there was in the entire universe just to punch a gateway through space-time, and yet there were the Stargates, linking worlds hundreds of light-years apart in the blink of an eye. It made her feel a bit giddy if she thought about it too much.

  Some days she felt like she had a handle on the gate, and then other times… It was moments like these that made her wish she had someone to confide in, somebody who, to put it bluntly, was as smart as she was. Being the most experienced scientist in a field that was generally regarded by most people in the outside world as pure science fiction could get lonely. The only other person who could come even close to Carter’s grasp on the theory of the Stargate was Rodney McKay, and it would have to get pretty serious before Sam would be willing to give that arrogant lab hack a call. But the thing was, the gate was doing things she’d never seen before— nothing that seemed immediately life-threatening, but enough to make her concerned.

  She glanced up as she finished her sandwich and saw Teal’c pass the open doorway to her lab. A thought struck her and she called out to him.

  The Jaffa loomed in the entrance. “Major Carter. Can I assist you?”

  “Actually, maybe you can.” She beckoned him over, calling up a new display panel on her screen. “It’s a safe bet that you’ve probably been through more Stargates more times than any one of us, right?”

  Teal’c nodded. “Correct. I have used the Chaapa’ai many thousands of times.”

  “And you’ve seen them malfunction.”

  “On extremely rare occasions.” He frowned slightly. “Have you encountered a problem with the Earth gate?”

  “You tell me.” Sam tapped a key and the monitor switched to a low-light view of the Stargate. A date and time-code in the corner of the screen showed that the recording was from the previous evening. Carter moved her mouse pointer over a section of the gate. “Keep your eye on this area here.”

  It happened very quickly; a flickering glint of light that sparked over the gray metal, and then vanished without a trace. Sam ran the recording again, this time at a third of the speed. “It lasted for less than two-tenths of a second. There, and then gone. It hasn’t affected the operation of the gate or any other systems, and there doesn’t appear to be any alteration to the machine code of the crystal circuits inside. Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

  “I have not,” Teal’c admitted. “Did this… flicker originate from the gate itself?”

  “It seems that way. I have a theory, but unless it happens again, there’s no way to prove it.” The Jaffa inclined his head, and Sam went on. “We know that the Stargates have an extra-dimensional component, because they draw energy from differential states in subspace, like the Zero Point Modules. They’ve got a… I guess you could think of it as a ‘shadow’, really, like an echo of the physical object that extends slightly into that realm, outside of normal space-time. I’m thinking this tiny surge of energy might be the equivalent of a safety valve linked to that.”

  “The Stargate harmlessly discharged an amount of energy it did not require.”

  “Exactly. But the question is, if that’s a normal function of the gate, why have we never seen it before?”

  “I can provide no answer for you, Major,” said the Jaffa. “Perhaps I could send a signal to the Tok’ra and ask them to examine your findings.”

  Sam deflated a little, losing her momentum after the explanation. “Couldn’t hurt, I suppose. I guess I’m just a little worried about giving the okay to resume off-world travel without an explanation. I mean, we rely on that thing week after week, but
the truth is we know very little about how it actually works.”

  “Major,” said Teal’c, “compared to the Goa’uld and the majority of the races we encounter, the Tau’ri’s level of knowledge about the Stargate is extensive. Many Systems Lords have operated them for centuries without even the most cursory understanding of their function. I have every confidence you will determine the true nature of this phenomenon.”

  She gave a wan smile. “Thanks for the support, Teal’c, but I have to level with you… The deeper I dig into this, the more questions and the fewer answers I have.”

  The apple crunched loudly as Daniel took a big bite from it, eating on the move as he wandered through the base toward the laboratory complex. He’d already had to avoid two knots of Secret Service men, both times finding the suited bodyguards in intense conversation with Air Force security personnel over some minor point of protocol. Jackson had learned from Walter in the gate-room that his least favorite senator— no, scratch that, his least favorite vice president— was on site and already throwing his weight around. Given that Kinsey was here to grab as much of the credit for the nascent Pack agreement as he could, Daniel knew that sooner or later he would be forced to stand in the same room as the man; and given his feelings toward the politician, to which loathing would be too mild a description, Jackson wanted to make sure that he spent as much time as he could, as far as way as possible from Kinsey’s line of sight. So far, so good.

  For a moment, he felt a little guilty about leaving Jack O’Neill and General Hammond to deal with the creep. But only for a moment. Sorry, fellas, he thought to himself, but rather you than me.

  Daniel returned to the apple as he rounded a corner to find Sergeant Siler and a striking young woman in a major’s uniform coming the other way. Siler was in the middle of giving her a perfunctory orientation. “That’s storage ten through twelve, and over there are the maintenance bays for the machine levels below this one,” he continued.