Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis - Far Horizons (16 page)

One of Carter’s guards said, “This woman is to be taken to the
feraq
victim at the hospital. She’s one of the ones he said would come for him.”

Carter smiled. Teal’c must have told them about her and O’Neill both.

A guard pulled another device out of his pocket and pressed a button, causing the portcullis to rise.

“Come with me, please.”

The streets of the city were made of cobblestone, and most people walked, though she saw a few wagon-wheeled carriages that were powered by tiny batteries. Apparently, they never developed the combustion engine, but went straight to electronics — and skipped over the notion of radial tires or asphalt.

The hospital was a surprisingly small building. There were no subdivided rooms, but simply one huge hall filled with beds. It took no time at all to pick out Teal’c, as he was larger than anyone else present and the only one with the gold symbol of Apophis on his forehead.

While the patients had a variety of hair types, Carter noticed that the people walking around the hospital all seemed to have either crew cuts — these appeared to be maintenance personnel — or kind of shaggy hair that hung near their necks. Based on what the guard said, these were the doctors and nurses.

One such, with shaggy black hair, was standing by Teal’c. “I really wish,” she was saying, “that we could study you in more depth, but that would require dissection, and I don’t think even you could recover from that.”

“Indeed.” He looked up at her approach. “Major Carter.”

“Teal’c. Are you okay?”

“I am fine.”

The doctor smiled. “He’s more than fine. I’m Tan Xirale. Anyone else who was as badly wounded by the
feraq
as Teal’c here was would be dead by now. The blood loss alone would have done it, given how long it took them to carry him down the mountain.”

“I’m glad you’re okay, Teal’c. But we need to get back up the mountain and figure out a way to get through that force shield.”

“Actually,” the doctor said, “you should talk to my sister. She’s the Chief Scientist of the city, and she can probably help you — and you can probably help her.”

Teal’c was free to go, and Xirale’s workday was done, so she led them to her sister’s office, which was only a few streets away.

This was another building with very few divisions in the room, but many desks. Apparently they weren’t big on private office spaces around here. Xirale brought them over to a woman with similar features, as well as the same color hair, also down to her shoulders, but much curlier. The woman in question was holding what looked like a laptop monitor without a keyboard, operating it by touching the screen.

“Sam Carter, Teal’c, this is Tan Nardah. Nardah, Teal’c is the patient I was telling you about.”

Nardah frowned at her sister. “I thought you said he was attacked by a
feraq
. He’s looking mighty healthy.”

“I am a Jaffa,” Teal’c said.

“Which means he heals fast,” Carter added with a smile. “Unfortunately, it’s just him. If it had been me who was attacked by the
feraq
, I’d probably need a lot more of your sister’s help.”

“Carter here,” Xirale said, “is a scientist.”

“Astrophysicist, actually.” Carter pointed at the screen of her device. “That looks like a schematic of the machine on the outskirts of the city.”

Nardah nodded. “It is.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“The short version? It’s broken.”

Carter peered more closely at it. “Looks like the geothermal taps are working beyond their capacity.”

Now Nardah turned and regarded Carter with appreciation. “Okay, when I saw your hair, I just assumed Xirale was joking about you being a scientist.”

Chuckling, Carter said, “Sorry, where I come from, hair doesn’t indicate job.”

Teal’c did his trademark head-tilt. “That is not entirely correct, Major Carter. The Air Force to which you belong requires hair be a certain length, and Jaffa tradition holds that First Primes must remain hairless.”

Nodding to concede the point, Carter said, “Still, I can be a scientist with hair like this. What does the engine do? Provide power?”

“I wish. No, this thing sucks up all our power — but without it, the entire planet would blow up.”

Carter blinked. “The tectonic stress from operating in two different timestreams?”

Now Nardah frowned. “Excuse me? I mean, yes, tectonic stress, but we haven’t been able to determine why it’s happening.”

“Is it localized under the mountain where the Stargate — the ring is?”

Nardah set the device down on her desk. “You can’t possibly have known that from looking at this schematic.”

“No, but I know where the temporal displacement is. Something is causing time to slow down on this planet — except for the area around the Stargate. We had a team come to this world a year ago, but then the Stargate was on an island.”

Shaking her head, Nardah said, “The best geological evidence we have is that this mountain has been here for two thousand years. But there’ve been a lot of tectonic shifts in those two thousand years, and the ocean has receded considerably, but —” She shook her head. “How can time move at a different rate in one section of the planet?”

“Naturally? It can’t. But there are lots of technologies that we barely understand that have done stranger things. We’ve seen devices that can move to alternate dimensions, that —”

Xirale held up a hand. “I hate to interrupt, but I need to get home. I assume I can leave these two in your care, Nardah?”

“Try to take them away from me,” Nardah said with a grin. “Carter, you may be the answer to our prayers. The machine has been able to stave off the tectonic stresses — without it, the entire continent would collapse, and possibly the entire planet would be destroyed — but we haven’t been able to figure out the cause.”

Carter nodded and glanced at Teal’c. “I might be able to help you with that — if you can help us with our problem. We need to get through to the Stargate.”

“We gave up hope of getting through to the oasis decades ago, but it’s been long enough that some fresh eyes might actually help.” Nardah put her left hand over her heart. “I promise that I will aid you in your quest, if you will help us in ours.”

Matching the gesture, assuming it to be the equivalent of shaking hands on a deal, Carter said, “I promise to do likewise.”

“As do I,” Teal’c said, without the gesture.

For the next several hours, Nardah showed Carter the workings of the machine, as well as the geological scans of the mountain and its environs.

Eventually, a man who resembled Nardah and Xirale both, but had a shaved head and a blond soul patch, entered the office. “Sister, it’s time to go home.”

Nardah closed her eyes and sighed. “Macri, you
really
don’t have to escort me home every night.”

“As long as you’re receiving death threats, I tend to disagree.”

Teal’c, who had been eating a meal Nardah had had delivered to the office, rose to his feet. “You are one of the officers who arrested the men I rescued.”

Macri nodded. “I’m Tan Macri. My other sister tells me that you two came through the ring?”

“Indeed. Please explain your reference to death threats.”

“It’s nothing,” Nardah said before Macri could answer.

“It’s
not
nothing,” Macri said in a long-suffering tone that reminded Carter a great deal of some of her arguments with her brother Mark. “There’s a faction of people who believe that the machine should be dismantled, that it’s consuming too much power for not enough gain.”

“They’re idiots. The earthquakes that will result from turning the machine off will destroy half the city.” Nardah shook her head. “I’m tempted to turn it off just so they can see how catastrophic it would be.”

Macri frowned. “Please tell me you’re not serious.”

Nardah regarded her brother with amusement. “I’m not serious. Entirely.” She then looked at Carter. “There’s an inn nearby, but I suspect that you don’t have any currency that we take, given that you’re from another world and all. However, I have an extra room in my dwelling, so the pair of you can stay with me in my guest room.”

“Actually,” Macri said, “why doesn’t Teal’c stay with me? I assume you two will be geebling about the machine at all hours, and based on the glazed look that Teal’c had when I came in here, he might enjoy staying with a peace officer more than he would a pair of scientists.”

Teal’c bowed his head. “Your offer is greatly appreciated, Tan Macri. I accept.”

“And I accept your offer,” Carter said with a grateful smile.

The next several weeks were at once fantastic and frustrating for Carter.

The machine was a device of exquisite design. Nardah was not the designer — that was her mentor, a now-deceased scientist named Yor Bestra — but she was the one who maintained it and who had made many improvements to it over the years. It was only staving off the inevitable. With each passing year it required more power to keep the tectonic stress and volcanic activity in check. Still, it did its job superlatively.

What frustrated her was an inability to figure out a way to stop the tectonic stress permanently, or a way to get through the force shield. The more time passed, the more the mountain’s ever-changing geological structure due to its moving at a different rate of time than the rest of the world, the more unstable it all became.

Equally frustrating were the constant barrage of protests against the use of the machine. Carter was mostly exposed to it in the form of e-mails that were sent to Nardah, as well as flyers and graffiti she saw on the walls of the city. (She couldn’t actually read them, but Nardah translated, albeit bitterly.)

Teal’c had been serving as an unofficial advisor to the peace officers, showing them some Jaffa techniques in hand-to-hand combat that they had never developed here. Meanwhile, Carter had been letting her hair grow out so she’d fit in more with Nardah and her co-workers at the science institute.

One day, Mardah, Macri, and Xirale all had dinner together, leaving Carter and Teal’c to share a meal alone for the first time in weeks.

“Have you made any progress in penetrating the force shield, Major Carter?”

Carter shook her head as she popped a bit of
feraq
chop into her mouth. “None. Most of the technology on this world is geared toward information storage and communications. Some of that has bled over into other technology, like powering their version of cars, but they’ve developed very little tech that directly affects the environment. Most of their tools are mechanical, they’ve never invented air conditioning or heaters — but those touchscreen devices can store five times as much information as the mainframe in Cheyenne Mountain.” Realizing she was burying the lede, she chuckled. “You know, by now, Colonel O’Neill would have interrupted me, made some kind of strangling noise, and told me to get to the point already.”

“It has been my observation that you do reach the crux of the matter eventually.”

She held up the mug of fruit juice in mock toast. “Well, thanks for that. Anyhow, the crux of the matter is that I need some kind of wave modulator and a frequency jammer that I can fine-tune to try and disrupt the force shield. I’ve actually been working on the design for that, but they don’t have the manufacturing capability here to do it.” Carter shook her head. “The hilarious part is, I can only design it because the computers here are so good. The modifications are based on how the wormhole interacted with the solar flare when we got sent back to 1969, and the studies they made at Area 51 of the quantum mirror before General Hammond destroyed it.”

Teal’c nodded. “Impressive.”

“Not really.” Carter blew out a breath. “Right now, it’s all theoretical. I don’t have the means to build what I need. We’re just barely earning our keep here helping the Tans. That’s one good thing; I’ve been able to help increase the efficiency of the machine, though I wish we had a real engineer here to give it a once-over. This is way out of my league.”

“I have found, Major Carter, that your league encompasses more than you give yourself credit for.”

“Maybe.” She shook her head and finished off her meal. “The good news is that we have plenty of time. I went up the mountain yesterday, and the colonel hasn’t even finished getting up off the ground yet.”

Carter was sitting at the desk that Nardah had issued her — right next to Nardah’s own — in the science institute, when the large monitor attached to the ceiling came to life.

Glancing over at one of the other scientists, Carter asked, “What’s that?”

“Level-one council session,” the scientist said, sounding bored. “The articles of law say that all such sessions have to be broadcast so the people can be aware of how the council functions. Mostly it just shows us how incredibly boring council sessions are.”

It didn’t take long for Carter to come to a similar conclusion to that of her colleague. But then, governmental procedure had never held any interest for her. She came from a military family where you followed orders handed down through the chain of command. Carter generally preferred the simplicity of a briefing to the tedium of a meeting. For one thing, she had yet to encounter a military operation that was ever in any way improved by a politician’s getting involved, from that congressman during the Gulf War who decided to go on a fact-finding tour that included Carter’s unit and nearly got himself killed in the process, to Senator Robert Kinsey’s attempt to shut the SGC down two years ago.

The only part of the broadcast that was in any way interesting was the fact that politicians here wore their hair in topknots, making them all look vaguely like samurai from feudal Japan.

However, one item on the agenda did grab her attention. A councilor named Kif Mirak asked to speak before the council on the subject of shutting down the machine. A majority of the remaining council agreed to let him speak, and then he stood.

“I would like to urge the council to once again take a vote regarding the shutting down of the machine. I am aware that the last ten votes have resulted in the resolution failing, however the latest power consumption reports have been issued, which prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the machine itself is simply consuming more power, with less impressive results.

“The fact of the matter is that the machine is a failure. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and it’s been doing it less and less well at greater and greater cost for years now. We need to shut it down and find a new way to stave off the geologic stresses that the science institute claims the machine is stopping.

“While we’re at it, we should also pass a resolution to have an independent study commissioned to see if the machine is even necessary. The problem may well have been resolved by the machine, and the continued running of it simply a boondoggle from the science institute to pour currency into their coffers to fix a problem that is already solved.

“Now, I don’t wish to impugn the good names of the people in the science institute — I’m sure they’re all fine, ethical people. But the fact of the matter is that we only have their word for the fact that the machine works. I think an independent study is necessary, which means shutting the machine down.