Stargate SG1 - Roswell (19 page)

Sam closed the laptop and secured it in a bag. “To ensure we don't run into any aircraft or high altitude weather balloons in 1947, you shouldn't attempt to use the time machine until we're in orbit.”

“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 you 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?”