Stargate SG1 - Roswell (8 page)

“Meticulous?
Hell, he couldn't even get the Xerox working properly.”

“What's a Xerox?”

Ignoring her perfectly reasonable question, Carter carried on as if Vala hadn't even spoken. “The Council punished him for that, Jack. But that's not the problem. Heimdall and Thor reviewed Loki's work, and they now believe that Loki did something much worse.”

“Ya
think?
It doesn't get much worse than having to go through puberty twice.”

O'Neill's experiences interested Vala far less than the idea that the overbearing and insufferably superior Asgard squabbled with one another. It opened a whole range of possibilities and perhaps a few hints as to why their technology was occasionally available on the open market.

“You remember that present you gave Thor?” Carter asked.

Vala couldn't decide if the look on O'Neill's face was uncertainty or guilt. Whatever it was, he followed it with a distinctly reluctant, “Yes?”

“It prompted Thor to cross-reference An's disappearance with historical events on Earth. He and Heimdall now believe Loki used what the Council ruled as an accident as an opportunity to supplant An.”

“And they took
how
many years to figure that out?”

 
“Between genetic degradation and rebuilding after the Replicator plague, they've been a little busy,” she said dryly. “Even under ideal circumstances the High Council can take decades to deliberate on important matters.”

While it was a very compelling story, Vala wasn't so easily convinced.
“Yes, but since your being here means we obviously succeed in recovering SG-1, you know we also recover An.
Why then didn't we...you...us...whatever...tell Thor and the
High Council about Loki after we got back?” She ignored the
baffled look that O'Neill leveled at her.

“It's a little complicated.” Carter's eyes dropped and she ran her
fingers across the fold in the paper. “The High Council is reluctant to accept they might have erred in ruling Loki blameless for the loss of An. Additionally, they don't sanction time travel, which means it's imperative this mission remain a secret and that you do
not
inform the Asgard after you return to this time. Once we take An back to the future, it's
a fait accompli.
The High Council will hold SG-1 blameless because,
of course, you didn't know about their laws on time travel.”

“So this Thor character wants us to do break their laws?” Vala
said. “What's in it for us?”

Pointedly ignoring Vala's not so rhetorical query—again—Carter handed O'Neill the paper she'd been toy-ing with. “Jack, we can't afford for the Asgard to die out, and since you're going back to the same space-time to extract SG-1
anyway, it's just a matter of beaming an additional passenger aboard, whose absence from that time won't impact anything because as far as I've been able to determine, he died very soon after the...accident.”

He opened the sheet and stared at the writing. “You're kidding.”

Vala caught a glimpse of the time, date and spatial coordinates.
It was meaningless to her, but then she wasn't terribly familiar
with Earth history—something she certainly intended to
rectify on their return.

Turning to leave, Carter said, “Makes sense, doesn't it?”

“What about this second set of coordinates? One hundred and thirty three miles, 60°55N 101°57E?”

“That's your safe arrival point twenty-four hours from now. The 'gate will be fully operational by then, so there'll be no delay in Herbert and I returning to our time with An. Good luck, Jack.”

Vala pushed herself off the chair and followed Carter to rear of the jumper. “Ah...General Carter, getting back to my first question, since we're not allowed to land anywhere and there's no little clock thingy on this—” She patted the time machine, which, she noted, was warm to the touch. “How is it that you know exactly
when
SG-1 are? Some sort of space-time loose thread detector? And since Dr. Lee has already programmed in the data from the Space Control Center mapping all that junk you have cluttering up your sky, why the co-ordinates on a teeny-weeny piece of paper?”

While that probably hadn't come out quite right, it was the thought that counted—and one General Carter appeared reluctant to answer because she was staring at something in the storage racks in the cargo bay. Vala followed the direction of her gaze to.. .the First Aid kit.

Before she could question Carter's interest in such a benign item, the General turned and walked down the ramp, speaking as she went. “The Ancient computer will respond to Jack's thoughts faster than information in a database. When Jack mentions the Cubs
you
need to think about Cy Young's second no hitter beating the Highlanders.”

That little snippet of entirely irrelevant information raised a dozen more questions, but it was evident from the way the General strode across to the waiting team of technicians, that Vala would get no more answers. Returning an encouraging smile and brief wave from Dr. Lee, she raised the hatch, checked to make certain it was sealed, and went forward, muttering, “Cy Young. Second no hitter. Highlanders. Got it.”

The copilot's chair—did these things even
need
a copilot? she wondered as she settled into the seat beside O'Neill—was far more comfy than the awkward and pretentious Ha'tak throne she'd once occupied. “So, what other goodies do you have stashed away in Areas One through Fifty?”

O'Neill's dark glasses, as far as Vala could tell, served little purpose other than to lend his already saturnine features an air of inscrutability. She decided to prod it and see what popped out. “You haven't a clue, have you?”

There was a moment of stony silence followed by, “There
are
no Areas One to Fifty.”

Judging by his tone he was telling the truth, and oddly, it made complete sense. The Goa'uld, Vala decided, had never stood a chance against such an unpredictable and altogether perverse people.

CHAPTER SIX

“Jumper
One you are cleared for takeoff,” Carter called over the radio.

“Thought we'd settled on
Homer,”
O'Neill muttered.

“I quite like Dr. Lee's
Tempus Fugit,”
Vala said.

The jumper lifted smoothly off the hangar floor, rotated a half turn and exited through a tall doorway and outside into bright sunlight. A paved surface stretched out before them. Apparently it had been built to allow their archaic winged aircraft to become airborne. Given the level of technology now available to them, Vala couldn't understand the attachment the inhabitants of the planet had for this primitive mode of transport, except perhaps that their 'jets' created criss-cross patterns called contrails in an otherwise cloudless sky.

“Tempus Fugit
is the mission name,” General Carter informed them over the radio.

The way in which O'Neill's mouth twisted into an uncertain line prompted Vala to say, “It means—”

“I
know
what it means. I'd just as sooner forget the three months of Daniel teaching me Latin, is all.”

Vala strongly suspected that had something to do with the favorite cereal comment he'd made earlier. While it might prove vaguely entertaining to entice the story from him, she decided that it would be more fun extracting it from Daniel.

“Heading due east to an altitude of six hundred miles. We can't track you on radar now you're in stealth mode,” Carter added, “so advise any course deviation.”

“Why do we need stealth mode over miles and miles absolutely nothing?” Vala wondered. The view was singularly uninspiring. To their left, a wide swathe of dirty white saltpan glinted in the sunlight. Everywhere else, the land was sunbaked and barren, reminding Vala a little of Asdak's world.

An insert in the HUD adjusted to display a magnified view of
people having what looked like a picnic, not far from the base.
Vala had noticed them earlier, but hadn't paid them much mind,
as picnics seemed to be all the rage on Earth. Then she realized
that they were all facing in one direction—toward the base. “What are the looking at?”

“Us,” O'Neill replied.

“But they can't see us because we're invisible...right?”

The grin reappeared. “Exactly.”

It took her a moment to process that, before she smiled. “Oh!
I've got it now. I saw this on Sol's tapes. You don't want any of the people who already know that you're using advanced alien technology to
know
that you're using advanced alien technology.”

With that mystery solved, she turned her interest to the darkening sky. The vague sense of oppression she felt when planet-bound receded at the first hint of stars.

Vala had often contemplated the stars as a child, wondering if they truly were, as her father had once told her, the hearth fires of distant worlds inhabited by terrible gods. The tiny jewels in the darkness had seemed too beautiful, too warm and inviting to be truly so bad.

How wrong she had been.

And yet, they had not lost their allure, and an old desire beckoned. “Do you ever wish you could just leave it all behind and keep going? Maybe find a simple little world where no one has ever heard of the Goa'uld or the Ori or even the Ancients?”

She was really just thinking out loud. It surprised her when O'Neill said, “Found a place like that once.”

“Really? How long did you stay?”

“Three months.”

She wondered if it had been boredom or a sense of duty that had pulled him away, but before she could ask him about it, the images flashing on the Asgard sensor drew her attention. “Oh my, you do have an awful lot of people who seem to be important enough to carry locator beacons.”

It wasn't a bad idea, she supposed. In the event of a full-scale attack by the Ori, key personnel could be beamed to safety and evacuated. “Do you think one of these is Senator Fishface? Here's an idea! We could test the Asgard transport on him if you like. Plonk him into one of the local brothels, perhaps? Might loosen him up a bit.”

Was that a smirk on O'Neill's face?

“Okay, base,” he announced for the benefit of Carter and the others back on Earth, without looking at Vala. “We're in position.”

The atmosphere blanketing the planet had thinned to a hazy glow across the curved horizon. Carefully checking the scanner again, Vala nodded and glanced at General O'Neill. “All set.”

“Then let's get this baby up to eighty-eight.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Despite her earlier remarks about the various temporal devices available on the market these days, and her casual acceptance of
post hoc
reasoning, she'd never actually heard of anyone who had successfully traveled in time. “When are we off to, first?”

O'Neill closed his eyes. “Figured maybe a nice round number, like fourteen hundred.”

A soft hum from the rear of the jumper increased in tempo, and the stars briefly flickered before shifting slightly. The cloud formations below had also altered significantly. The readout on the HUD indicated several changes in the atmospheric content, considerably less carbon dioxide and methane, for starters, and the Asgard scanner registered only hers and O'Neill's signals.