STARGATE SG-1-23-22-Moebius Squared-s11 Read online

  Other than being solid rock and having a Stargate in it, it wasn’t the same. Three pads were suspended over a deep chasm. One of them held the Stargate and one a conventional set of Rings. The third had a bunch of control panels — presumably the DHD for the Stargate, the controls for the Rings, and other stuff. Sam was already heading for the controls, slinging one of the heavy cases with her. In the middle…

  Cam walked along the platform toward it. He’d never seen anything like it, nor did he have any idea what it was supposed to do. It was a massive banded column of dirty steel about thirty feet high, not as wide as a set of Rings, though a couple of guys could fit in it nicely. Some kind of transport device? Some kind of…something?

  Sam was glancing over the control panel, her eyes roving from one screen to another. “OK, this is interesting.”

  “What is?” Cam asked.

  Teal’c came and leaned over her shoulder. “Fascinating,” he said.

  Right. Everybody read Goa’uld except him. In the last couple of years the Ori had seemed more to the point. “I’ll just watch the door,” Mitchell said.

  “Solar flares,” Sam said, apropos of nothing.

  “What?”

  She looked around. “Solar flares. This installation is hooked into a massive subspace communications system monitoring solar activity in real time. There must be thousands of satellites around thousands of suns. It’s an enormous undertaking.”

  “Cool,” Mitchell said. “That’s a good thing to find, right? We can learn a lot from that.”

  “The question is why it was interesting to Ba’al,” Daniel said.

  Sam nodded grimly. “That is the question.”

  “We’ve run into way too many of Ba’al’s traps in the past,” Mitchell said.

  Daniel looked worried. “That stuff he was saying at the extraction, about having a failsafe…”

  “I’ll figure out what it does,” Sam said, spreading her hands on the keyboard. “We’ll get a handle on it.”

  Cam turned, looking around the massive chamber. Rings. Control panel. Strange column. Stargate. “I don’t like this a bit,” he said to Teal’c.

  “It’s a short list,” Lt. Colonel Davis said, laying the one page report on Jack’s desk. “Here are General Pellegrino’s recommendations. They’re all excellent officers.”

  “They should be,” Jack said. His hand twitched, but he didn’t pick up the paper yet. “Command of the George Hammond is a big responsibility.”

  “Yes, sir.” Davis hovered, waiting.

  “That will be all,” Jack said.

  “Yes, sir.” Davis turned to leave.

  “Do I have to make a recommendation?”

  Davis turned back. “No, sir. But a lack of your endorsement will be seen as a black mark.”

  “Understood.”

  Davis nodded shortly. There was nothing he knew that he shouldn’t. Davis never knew anything he shouldn’t.

  The door closed behind him, and Jack took a long breath and strolled over to his windows. Homeworld Security had offices with Homeland Security on Massachusetts Avenue, rather than in the Pentagon, and he had to say that at least the view was better, looking up the street toward the white marble grandeur of Union Station and Columbus Circle, a beautiful autumn day in DC, with the sky an impenetrable shade of blue, looking as though the ceiling were almost solid. His reflection in the glass didn’t mar the view.

  Jack O’Neill was a good man. Lots of people said so. A good officer. A good friend. Once they’d said he was a good husband and a good father, though they’d been wrong about that. But overall, he was a good guy.

  He’d never had any pretensions to greatness. In the course of thirty-five years in the Air Force he’d seen greatness, the ones who had whatever it was, that rare combination of talent and luck and character that propelled some people to soar above their peers. Vision. Leadership. Longing. Maybe it was that they desired something so much that the world bent around them. Or maybe they were just that good. He wasn’t one of them. He was a good man. And he did a good job. But he knew it when he saw it. He heard the sound of wings, even if it was a music he couldn’t make. And he’d never stand in the way.

  He walked back to his desk and picked up the piece of paper. Command of the George Hammond, Earth’s newest starship, bound on journeys that were literally unbelievable, distant and deadly, to places and things that would change one forever.

  He wasn’t surprised at the first name.

  Colonel Samantha Carter.

  Vala Mal Doran was bored. Bored, bored, bored. She wandered around the briefing room picking up first one thing and then another. Laser pointer. That was kind of cool. Would it be diffused by glass? If she shone it through the window into General Landry’s office and made the little red point of light dance around on his desk…

  Landry looked up. “Will you stop that?”

  She took that as an invitation to come in, pocketing the laser pointer as she did. “Explain to me again why I can’t go join the team?”

  Landry sighed. But he didn’t look all that fascinated by his paperwork either. “Do you know how much power it takes to open that gate? Do you know how expensive that is? We have thirty SG teams and the Atlantis expedition. Which means the gate is flapping all day. Not only that, there are scheduled check-ins from twenty or so different sources in every 24 hour period, teams checking in, Atlantis dumping mail, allies… We can’t open the gate every time somebody wants to go somewhere. You were offworld when SG-1 left. There is no critical reason you need to be on this mission. So. I’m not opening the gate so you can go join them. You can wait right here until they get back.”

  “Teaching me a lesson?” Vala perched on the edge of his desk.

  “Teaching everybody a lesson about conserving power and time. We don’t use the gate unless it’s mission-specific.”

  “You’re crabby today,” Vala observed.

  “Thank you.” Landry bent over his paperwork again.

  Vala didn’t move. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Dr. Jackson returning to the team since he got out of the infirmary after yet another attempt to move to Atlantis went entirely and completely pear shaped? Because if it does, I have to tell you that I’m completely over Daniel.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Landry said. He didn’t look up.

  “Really. Actually.”

  Landry did look up then. “I could care less. Is that clear? I am not your gal pal, and whoever you have a thing for or don’t have a thing for, I don’t care.”

  “I don’t think that’s what gal pal means,” Vala began, but the warning claxons interrupted her.

  “Unauthorized gate activation!”

  “Not again,” Landry said, getting heavily to his feet. “Let’s go see who wants what.” He went down the stairs to the control room, Vala trailing him.

  The airman on duty looked up. “Sir, the IDC is the Tok’ra High Council.”

  “Open the shield,” Landry directed. “And tell them they’re welcome.” He didn’t sound precisely thrilled, but then Vala supposed the Tok’ra High Council were pretty much the definition of a cheerless lot. Unfortunately, they were also the definition of really important allies. Landry straightened his tie.

  The shield retracted, and five Tok’ra stepped through the glowing blue of the wormhole, two women and three men in the tan and white clothing the Tok’ra preferred. Two of them looked vaguely familiar. Maybe she’d seen them in the background at the extraction? She hadn’t paid all that much attention to every attendant. She thought she’d at least seen that one in front with the shock of brown hair.

  A lieutenant met them on the gateroom floor, exchanging pleasantries gamely, and then escorted them into the control room to Landry.

  “General Landry,” the young man with brown hair said gravely. “It is an honor to meet a man about whom I have heard so much.”

  “Thank you,” Landry said.

  “Vala Mal Doran,” Vala put
out there.

  “We bring a matter of concern to the Tok’ra High Council,” he said formally.

  “If you’d care to take a walk up to my office, I’d be delighted to discuss it,” Landry said with a look at Vala that pretty clearly said stay here and out of the way.

  “We would prefer to discuss it here,” the woman at his shoulder said. Vala heard the buzz of the zat’nik’tel arming a bare second before the bright stun beam caught her full in the chest.

  Chapter Two

  Vala awoke with a shoe in her mouth. Perhaps not exactly in her mouth, but with the toe resting at her lips. One eye opened. The shoe was attached to a foot in a black sock, attached to a leg that seemed to be attached to an unconscious General Landry.

  Another foot, this one moving. Someone in Tok’ra boots stepped over Landry’s body. Vala closed her eyes quickly. It wasn’t hard to stay still. She wasn’t sure she could move if she tried. Every muscle in her body felt like lead. Still, she was conscious and aware. That was better than everyone else who had been in the control room. She had no doubt that the airmen on duty were also unconscious.

  They didn’t know who she was, Vala thought, as she heard the sounds of hands on keyboards. They didn’t recognize her as the woman who had once been host to the Goa’uld Quetesh. It must be some residual effect of that, the naquadah still in her blood or something, that had rendered her slightly less susceptible to the zat than Landry and the others. Which meant the only place they had seen her was probably where she had seen them — at the extraction ceremony she’d attended as a member of SG-1. They didn’t know she wasn’t Tau’ri.

  More keyboard clicks, and then an all too familiar sound. The gate was dialing. The Tok’ra had done whatever it was they’d come for and were dialing out.

  Another set of steps. “Are you done?”

  “Yes,” the one at the dialing computer replied.

  The new voice was appraising. “Which of these is Landry?”

  “That one.”

  Vala tensed.

  “Help me lift him up where he can be seen from the floor. She needs a little persuading.”

  Who needs? There were more sounds, and Vala shifted slightly. She could flex her fingers. Movement was returning. She was a long way from being able to jump two people, but feeling was coming back. She needed to see the dialing address. It would be displayed on the monitor of the central workstation. If she could lift her head a few inches she ought to be able to see it. Vala looked out through her lashes. Not quite. The edge of the desk was in the way.

  The two Tok’ra were lifting General Landry up, his head lolling forward. He could be seen through the window. If there were shouts or voices down on the gateroom floor she couldn’t hear them. The glass was too thick.

  They lowered him heavily into the controller’s chair. Now it was Landry’s arm that blocked her view of the dialing computer. “Let’s go,” one of them said.

  They stepped over her hastily on their way out. She heard their booted feet on the floor outside.

  Vala raised her head. The dialing address. It wasn’t one she was familiar with. Fishhook, star, boat. Shield, torch, dragon’s tail. And the circle above the pyramid, of course. Her head spun. Gathering her strength, Vala pushed up on both elbows. Her legs didn’t work very well, but she lunged forward and dragged herself to her knees on the edge of the desk. She could just peer through the bottom of the window between the monitors.

  Sitting on the floor of the gateroom in front of the open wormhole was a puddle jumper. Which suddenly made the bit with Landry make sense. Only one person currently assigned to the base and not on an offworld team had a naturally expressed ATA gene — Dr. Carolyn Lam. If the Tok’ra were trying to steal a puddle jumper, they’d have to get someone to fly it. No doubt Dr. Lam had refused. At least until they’d demonstrated that her father was completely in their power.

  The two Tok’ra from the control room were doing something, opening a device beside the puddle jumper, one Vala recognized all too well. A timed charge. Detonating in the gateroom, it wouldn’t damage the gate and the explosion wouldn’t be bad enough to break the heavy bulletproof glass of the control room windows. However, the unconscious airmen on the floor of the gateroom would be toast. And it would probably screw up the power supply cables to the gate badly enough that it would be hours if not days before the gate could be used again. The Tok’ra looked around nervously, as though not certain that the door was secure. It was closed, of course. But there were plenty of people who could override it. In fact, probably right now people were trying to get onto this level. They would. Vala was sure of that. But not fast enough. And with the wormhole open, no offworld teams could get through and interrupt.

  She dragged herself to the communications console, keeping her head down. And of course they’d slagged it. There wasn’t anything but the loudspeaker to the gateroom working, the low-tech handset that Walter used to warn people on the floor when the gate was about to activate.

  Still, she had to make sure they didn’t set the timer…

  There was someone’s pistol on the floor under the desk. Fat lot of good that did. It wouldn’t penetrate the bulletproof glass either. And nobody kept an automatic in the control room. Vala patted her pockets absently.

  The laser pointer. The one she’d picked up in the briefing room. Could the Tok’ra tell the difference between a laser pointer and a laser sight? She bet not.

  Vala opened the intercom and turned on the pointer, letting it play through the glass, dancing over the side of the puddle jumper as though hunting a target. “Get your hands up!” she said authoritatively. “We have you covered. Drop your weapons!” She sighted the pointer on the nearest Tok’ra, red dot against the side of his head.

  He dodged reflexively, his friend shouting something as the pointer swung to her. The first Tok’ra made a dive for the puddlejumper doors, the second following after. If she’d actually had a P90, Vala would have had a perfect shot.

  Unfortunately, what she actually had was a laser pointer, so she was reduced to shouting for them to drop their weapons and stand down while the tailgate of the jumper came up and the jumper leapt forward through the open wormhole.

  “Damn it,” Vala said quietly as the event horizon died.

  Beside her, Landry moaned.

  Still hanging on to the edge of the desk, Vala bent over him. “General Landry? Wake up. It’s Vala. Come on. Rise and shine.”

  He opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut again. “What in the hell?” he whispered.

  “It’s not good,” Vala said grimly.

  Sam bent over the control board, a fascinated expression on her face. “I think this is some kind of time travel machine,” she said.

  “Come again?” Cam said.

  “Time travel.” She looked up at him, her hands still on the keys. “Other than Ancient artifacts, the only way we know of to travel through time occurs at the intersection of an active wormhole and a solar flare. The problem is that solar flares are only predictable for a few minutes before they occur, and the only way to guess the time you would go to would involve intersecting the solar flare with a wormhole in the correct place by dialing the right gate at the right moment. Essentially impossible. Unless, of course, you can monitor the solar activity of hundreds of suns and simultaneously calculate where each one would take you if you dialed what. I think that’s what this machine does.”

  “Oh, not good,” Daniel said.

  “Indeed,” Teal’c added, his voice concerned. “Perhaps that is what Ba’al meant about a failsafe.”

  “Well, if it is, it didn’t work,” Cam said sensibly. “Our timeline hasn’t changed.”

  “Would we know if it had?” Sam asked. “I don’t think so.”

  “I feel the same as always,” Cam said.

  “You would feel the same as always,” she said. “We all would. If the timeline changed, we’d never be aware that we were now living in an alternate universe, or that other ones of us
might have had very different experiences.”

  “That’s creepy,” Cam said.

  Sam looked disturbed. “Tell me about it.”

  “Wait,” Daniel said. “But we do know. Remember the video tape we got from the jar hidden in Egypt? The one from a team of alternate us that told us not to do anything? The one found about four years ago?”

  “That’s different,” Sam said. “They had crossed over from an alternate timeline into our past, so now they were in the same timeline, just at a different point in it.”

  “You have totally lost me,” Cam said. He thought Teal’c wanted to agree, but he wouldn’t say it.

  “Look, it’s like sheets of paper. If you have a legal pad, say. You can draw a circle on the first page, and then on page four, and then another on page one. You can’t see the ones on page one and page four at the same time because they’re on different planes, and they’re two dimensional objects. But you can see both the circles on page one at the same time because while they don’t occupy the same coordinates, they’re on the same plane.”

  Daniel’s brow furrowed. “So you’re saying that the alternate team and us are on the same plane, in the same timeline, but we’re just at different points, whereas teams from another alternate reality, like the quantum mirror ones, aren’t in the same timeline.”

  “Yes.” Sam nodded encouragingly. “It’s really simple.”

  “So this…” Cam gestured to the machinery. “This can only move us backwards and forwards in our own timeline.”

  “That’s my best guess,” Sam said. She pushed her bangs back out of her face. Her hair had grown out and was now caught in a pony tail at the back of her neck. “Just like Janus’ puddlejumper.”

  “I don’t even want to think about that thing,” Daniel said. “Or anything else to do with Janus.” He winced.

  “Sorry,” Sam said. “Sore spot.”

  “Damn right.” Daniel had only been out of the infirmary for two weeks since his latest brush with one of Janus’ inventions. This one had gotten him kidnapped and electrocuted.