Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis - Far Horizons (15 page)

STARGATE SG-1:
Time Keeps on Slippin’
by Keith R.A. DeCandido

This story takes place between “Nemesis,” the third-season finale of
Stargate SG-1
, and “Small Victories,” the fourth-season premiere.

For Major
Samantha Carter, it was always a question of multitasking.

Under normal circumstances, it would be the easiest thing in the world to keep track of three things at once, even if those three things were remembering how much time had elapsed, keeping herself alive while under heavy fire, and paying attention to the vibration of the ship around her. The latter was particularly important, as those vibrations would increase when the ship in question, the Asgard vessel
Beliskner
,
was touching the stratosphere.

Complicating matters, though, was the second part. Even at the height of the Gulf War, she’d never been under fire quite like this. Hundreds and hundreds of mechanical spider-like creatures that Thor of the Asgard referred to as “Replicators” were skittering toward her. By her side were Colonel Jack O’Neill and Teal’c. The sound of metal on metal from the Replicators’ movements, the mechanical humming of the creatures, both sounding a hundred times over, combined with the hum of the active Stargate behind her and the reports of two SPAS-12s and her own GAU 5/A all firing over and over on semi-automatic to keep the Replicators at bay.

The close quarters of the chamber on the
Beliskner
made it as loud as anything Carter had ever experienced, the cacophony making it nigh-impossible to concentrate enough to focus on one thing, much less all three.

Somehow O’Neill managed to shout over all that. “Carter!”

“Not yet, sir!”

They had transported the Stargate from Cheyenne Mountain to the
Beliskner
, and Teal’c had manually dialed it to another world. She had already sent the stasis pod with the very ill Thor through the Stargate. Now she was waiting for the right moment for them to join him: soon enough for the friction of atmospheric entry to aid the explosives Teal’c had planted on the hull in destroying the ship, but not so long that the selfsame friction would burn off the explosives. Then O’Neill would set off the detonator and they’d step through the Stargate to safety while the
Beliskner
was destroyed along with all the Replicators.

She hoped.

The vibration in the deckplates increased, and the right amount of time had elapsed, and Carter really hoped that the former wasn’t because of the thousands and thousands of replicators moving across the deck.

“Now!”

O’Neill stopped firing and pulled the detonator out of a pouch, Teal’c shifting his field of weapons fire to cover the colonel.

He pushed the button and cried, “Let’s go!”

All three of them dove through the Stargate. Carter did a right shoulder roll that would have made Sergeant Nadaner back at the Academy proud, but she still wrenched her shoulder, as the ground was far lower than expected. Most Stargates had a ramp or stairs or were buried partway into the ground, but this one was apparently off the ground but without easy access. When they went home, they were going to need to take a big step up to go through.

The wormhole closed with a swish, and Carter looked around as she scrambled to her feet, favoring her right shoulder as she did so. She saw a large plateau with several trees and bushes, and a small lake. Thor’s pod floated in the air near the DHD. In the distance, she could only see mountain tops covered in snow. The sky overhead was full of clouds, but the sky over the horizon was oddly — well, blurry.

“Everyone okay?” O’Neill asked, yanking his safety goggles off his face. With bullets and blown Replicator bits flying all over the place, the eye protection had been necessary on the
Beliskner
.

“I am fine, O’Neill,” Teal’c said. After taking his own goggles off, he removed the magazine from his SPAS-12 and replaced it with a fresh one.

“Me, too, sir.” Carter looked over at the Jaffa. “Teal’c, where are we?”

“P4X-234. I chose an address that could be manually dialed with the greatest speed and efficiency.”

“Good thinkin’.” O’Neill headed to the DHD.

“Sir, I wouldn’t bother dialing home.” Carter took off her own goggles before gingerly shouldering her rifle. “Remember,
we
just used the main Earth gate. It’ll take at least a day or two for them to get the beta gate out of storage and install it.”

O’Neill blew out a breath. “Right.” The second gate that Carter and O’Neill had found in Antarctica had been in storage ever since those rogue N.I.D. agents were caught using it. “Maybe the Asgard will come and fetch Thor and give us a lift. Meantime, I
really
hope that P4X-234 is a friendly planet.”

“It should be.” Carter, though, was dubious even as she said it. “Teal’c, are you sure that’s where you dialed?”

Teal’c sounded more than a little nonplussed. “Indeed.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to doubt you, but — well, the reports SG-4 made last year were that the gate was on an island. This is on a mountain.” Carter looked around. “But this area matches the description perfectly otherwise. The lake, the trees, the bushes. Captain Zerelli even reported that the water in the lake was drinkable and the fruits on those bushes were edible.”

“Good,” O’Neill said, heading for the lake, “’cause I’m starving and thirsty. Carter, did SG-4 find any people?”

Carter shook her head. “No, sir, but it was just a big ocean all around. For land like this to just show up around it would take millennia of continental drift.”

O’Neill was cupping water from the lake into his hands. “Ahhh. I needed that. All right, let’s take a few minutes to relax. I, for one, could use a break.”

Carter smiled. “Well, sir, you did want to go fishing.”

With a snort, O’Neill fell more than sat on the ground next to one of the bushes. He was still in the civilian clothes he’d been wearing when Thor beamed him to the
Beliskner
. They had all been on vacation while Dr. Daniel Jackson recovered from an appendectomy, but then the crisis with Thor and the Replicators happened.

Her smile falling, Carter added, “I just hope the Asgard ship was completely destroyed.”

“Not a helluva lot we can do about it now.” He picked a few berries off the bush and popped them in his mouth. “Mmm, tastes like boysenberry.”

“Well, that’s good,” Carter said.

O’Neill shook his head. “Actually, I hate boysenberry. So please, have as much as you want.” He pointed at the bush. “Let’s all catch our breath, eat, drink, and be merry, and then we’ll do some recon.”

Carter and Teal’c both sat alongside O’Neill. The berries didn’t taste anything like boysenberry to Carter, but she didn’t contradict the colonel. As for Teal’c, he bit one, swallowed it very gingerly, and then intoned, “My symbiote allows me to go many days without food.”

“You don’t like boysenberry either, huh?” O’Neill sighed. “All right, since you’re not eating, Teal’c, you start the recon.”

Clambering to her feet, Carter said, “I’ll go too, sir. I want to examine the area around here, see why it’s so different from what SG-4 reported.”

O’Neill threw up his hands. “Yah sure youbetcha,” he said in the same bad Minnesota accent he’d used to try to convince her to come fishing with him.

With a chuckle, Carter followed Teal’c as they headed toward the edge of the clearing.

But when Teal’c got to the edge of the grass line, he suddenly disappeared.

“Teal’c!” Carter was only two steps behind him.

When she passed the edge of the grass, however, Teal’c was nowhere to be found, but the sky was no longer blurry. Instead, there was a certain amount of cloud cover.

On the ground next to her were Teal’c’s rifle and zat’ni’katel.

“Sir,” she started as she turned around, but when she looked back at the plateau, O’Neill wasn’t moving. The colonel was in the midst of getting up from the ground, but he looked frozen in place.

“Colonel!”

O’Neill didn’t respond, didn’t move, didn’t budge. Carter started to move back toward him —

— and couldn’t. It was like there was an invisible wall — or, more likely, a force shield — keeping her out of the plateau.

Cadet Samantha Carter who graduated the Academy at the top of her class would have been utterly baffled by the current situation, convinced that someone was playing a trick or that perhaps she was going mad.

Major Samantha Carter, though, had spent the past three years as part of SG-1 and not only wasn’t baffled, but was pretty sure she had figured it all out already. To prove it, she bent down and picked up Teal’c’s rifle. The SPAS-12’s magazine was completely empty. He had just reloaded it when they came through the gate — there was no way he could have shot all those rounds, even on semi-automatic, in the two seconds between his “disappearance” and Carter going through that apparent force shield.

For whatever reason, time was moving at a far greater rate away from the Stargate than it was on the plateau. The colonel
was
moving, but relative to the speed at which Carter was now moving, it was like he was standing still.

Teal’c could have been there for hours before moving away, and it would have appeared to Carter as if he’d just disappeared.

She noticed something else on Teal’c’s rifle: blood.

Looking down on the ground, she saw more blood. The trail continued down the mountain. Carter didn’t have Teal’c’s tracking ability, but even she could follow that…

She turned to make one more attempt to get through the force shield, even shooting her GAU 5/A at it, but the rounds just ricocheted off, and she stopped for fear of being hit with one.

If Teal’c was hurt, her first priority was to find him and try to rescue him. If she was lucky, O’Neill wouldn’t have finished getting up by the time she got back. She hoisted both Teal’c’s rifle and her own, wincing at the pain in her right shoulder, and kept the zat’ni’katel in her right hand. The zat had been of no use against the Replicators, but she figured it was best for her primary weapon to be a non-lethal one, at least to start.

Eventually, the blood trail thinned to the point of uselessness, but by then she was in sight of a large city in the valley between this mountain and the next one over. There were no other signs of civilization, though she did see disturbingly large animal tracks here and there on the ground.

Even as she worked her way down, so many thoughts vied for attention in her head, and, just as she had on Thor’s ship, she kept them all going in her mind at once.

The astrophysicist in her wondered how this planet could possibly function, with one section of it moving at a different rate of time. She was no geologist, but she imagined the stresses alone would tear the mantle apart.

The soldier in her thought back over the battle on Thor’s ship, hoping that the explosives Teal’c placed on the
Beliskner
were enough to destroy the ship and the Replicators, thus saving Earth. She had a very real concern that the plan hadn’t worked and by the time Stargate Command got the beta gate up and running, they’d be going back to an Earth that was overrun by Replicators.

The space nerd in her, the one who asked her parents for a telescope for her fifth birthday, was once again grooving on the notion of walking on alien soil. It had been three years since she set foot on Abydos after going through the gate for the first time, and the thrill of placing her boots on a planet that wasn’t Earth had yet to diminish. She truly hoped it never would.

As she got closer, she noticed that the far end of the city had a huge industrial complex that was powered by four massive engines, all of which had what appeared to be geothermal taps. Also, the entire city, except for that complex, was surrounded by a stone wall. The buildings inside seemed to be made of refined metal, for the most part, and Carter found it an interesting juxtaposition of styles between the architecture of the wall versus that of the city.

She spied a metal portcullis embedded in the stone wall, guarded by two men, both of whom were as bald as Teal’c, and also had little tufts of blond hair on their chins. Carter was amused by the fact that these people, on a planet billions of miles from Earth, had also developed the soul patch as a fashion statement. They were armed, so Carter figured it was best to not escalate matters by showing off her own weaponry. She holstered the zat.

The men held up their weapons, which looked like Civil War-era pistols. “Halt!” one cried.

Carter held up both hands. “My name is Major Samantha Carter. I come from a place called Earth. I came through the Stargate, and I’m looking for a friend of mine who I believe was brought here hurt.”

Looking at each other briefly, one of the guards said, “Describe your friend.”

“Taller than me, bald, with a golden symbol of a serpent on his forehead.”

Now the guards nodded at each other. “The
feraq
victim,” one said.

The other removed a small device from his pocket and put it to his throat. “Hem ten, this is hem fifteen. We need an escort to the hospital.”

A tinny voice sounded over the small speakers of the device. “Acknowledged, hem ten. Escort will arrive shortly.”

“Wait here, please,” the guard said as he pocketed the device. “Someone will take you to your friend in the hospital.”

Carter nodded.

The other one asked, “You said ‘Stargate’? Is that what you call the ring in the oasis on the mountain?”

Allowing herself a small smile, Carter replied, “Yes. We use it to travel to other worlds. There’s an entire network of them.” She decided to venture a question of her own. “What’s a
feraq
?”

“Vicious beast that roams the countryside. They’re why our ancestors built this wall, in fact. Your friend saved the lives of two idiots who were out trying to capture one of the beasts without a hunting license.”

“Yeah, Macri took those two in
right
off,” the other guard said with a chuckle. “They thought your friend was one of us, on account of his lack of hair.”

“Speaking of which, with hair like that, what do you
do
, exactly?”

Carter blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Well, your hair’s way too long for you to be a menial, and too long for a tradesperson. And it would need to be longer for you to be a scientist.”

Suddenly, Carter wished Daniel was here. He would be fascinated by the contradictory architecture, and would probably have a theory about why they had sophisticated communications technology but ancient firearms. Plus this whole adjust-your-hair-length-to-fit-your-job thing was bizarre to say the least.

Another man with a shaved head and a blond soul patch stood on the other side of the portcullis.