Stargate SG1 - Roswell (51 page)

“If you mean this gentleman,” Vala replied, “On whom the future of the human race apparently rests, almost as good as new— Whoa!” A beam of light enveloped Three Finger and he vanished while she was speaking. She turned to Sam in outrage. “What did you do that, for?”

“He was healed, right?”

“Well yes, but you could have given me a moment's warning.

The view outside abruptly altered as the jumper took off in a southerly direction. “Sorry, but we couldn't afford for him to wake up in here.”

“Mordecai 'Three Finger' Brown,” Daniel replied, “died in the fire we accidentally started at Brown University in 1908, setting in motion a chain of events that—”

“It wasn't supposed to happen,” Sam finished, her attention split between her laptop and an Asgard scanner that looked significantly different to the model that had been sitting there just a few hours earlier. “We had to make sure that this time, he survived.”

This time?

She offered Cam another brief smile and returned her attention to her computer, leaving him no more enlightened than he had been a few moments ago.

Hoping the Jaffa might know something, Cam looked to Teal'c. “Hey, buddy—”

“It is good to see you again, Colonel Mitchell,” Teal'c said. “I am pleased that you are no longer First Prime to Qetesh.”

Cam stared at him blankly. Vala reacted immediately, however. Her head snapped up. “Qetesh? Please don't tell me she's involved in any of this?”

Cam didn't even want to know about Qetesh. But he'd just realized someone was missing who'd been here the last time he
was
in the jumper. “What have you done with Loki?”

Outside, they were just coming up to Florida.

“Pull up a chair, Mitchell,” O'Neill suggested. “It's a very long story.” Then he glanced at Sam and added with a distinctly childish smirk, “And Carter can't wait to tell you all about it.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

So, somewhere out there in a, presumably budded-off time loop, Vala thought, she'd married that rather nice boy from her village, most likely had several babies—real babies, not the genetically created abomination that the Ori had used her body to manufacture, just so they could break the Ancients' rules—and lived a fully and doubtless happy life free of Goa'uld infestation.

On the other hand, another version of herself had ended up back in the hands of Qetesh, had two children destined to become hosts for Ra and Qetesh—which was an option that she really would much prefer not to think about—and ended up being...what? “Was the nuclear bomb actually detonated aboard Qetesh's ship?”

From the front seat of the jumper, Sam's expression turned pensive. “Yes.”

Well, it could have been worse. She could have ended up in Baal's company again—another option that definitely was not worth thinking about.

“And I stayed behind to clean up the mess, huh?” Cam said.

If Sam's smile seemed a little forced, her tone was more upbeat. “Last seen, Cam, you were about to take an Asgard to meet Harry S. Truman.”

While Vala had no idea what was so amusing, Cam laughed. “What, you mean like
take me to your leader?'

“See,” General O'Neill remarked from the pilot's seat. “He thinks it's funny.”

The jumper was descending in darkness, but the HUD indicated they were coming up to a landmass that, enhanced on the screen, Vala recognized as the frozen continent at the bottom of the planet—bottom, of course, being a term that hardly meant much from space, but it was another one of those cultural
things she'd gotten down quite well. A reassuring blip denoting
naquadah indicated that the second Stargate was present there. It was midwinter and the current outside temperature was, according to the display, a bracing minus forty-three degrees. Centigrade. “Chilly. Tell me we're not going to have
to get out and dig?”

The blip on the screen enlarged, and Sam replied, “The Antarctic 'gate was left behind by the Ancients when they took
Atlantis
to the Pegasus Galaxy, millions of years ago. When General O'Neill and I arrived here by accident in 1998, the 'gate
was buried beneath a glacier several hundred feet deep.”

“What about when the Ancients came back, ten thousand years
ago?”

“We believe that was through the 'gate at Giza,” said Daniel, “Which Ra put there in prehistoric times, soon after he took his first human host. According to Plato, the Atlanteans had 'subjugated the lands of Libya and Egypt' before their descendants moved to Athenia—modern day Athens. We now know that most of the Lanteans left because they found Earth too primitive.

“Prior to the construction of the pyramids, Ra sometimes didn't return to Earth for decades, even centuries at a time. There's
no naquadah on Earth, so it wasn't the most desirable of locations except insofar as it provided a readymade population of slaves. Presumably that's why he began extracting
entire
civilizations and seeding them around the galaxy to naquadah-rich planets.”

Before Daniel had a chance to get too deeply into the entire history of Earth, Sam, thankfully, jumped ahead. “In 1998,” she
explained, “I was kind of surprised that the Antarctic 'gate wasn't completely buried in ice, with only a cavern the size of
the
one we found ourselves in under Cheyenne Mountain. Instead, much of the area around the 'gate and DHD had been thoroughly excavated, and there was a tunnel all the way to the surface.”

“Positively homely, I thought,” said the General.

Sam winced, which reminded Vala that she had a considerable amount of reading to catch up on when they returned to the SGC.

“Didn't you find dead Jaffa near the DHD?” Cam asked.

“Two. We think the Jaffa tried to blast their way out using their staff weapons, but dating of the bodies indicated that that was thousands of years ago,” Sam explained. “Probably soon after the Egyptian 'gate was buried, but the thing is, I found a tunnel to the surface.”

“And this is unusual because...?”

“There's very little snowfall over that area of the Antarctic, so little that it's actually classified as a desert. Consequently the glacier over the 'gate is relatively slow moving. With no rainfall or melt-water tunneling through crevasses, there shouldn't have been any kind of opening to the surface, certainly not one that close to the 'gate.

“There was also a tunnel the exact size and shape of a jumper leading out the other side. It was just too coincidental. Slow moving doesn't mean
no
movement, however, and even had the Jaffa and the Ancients created the tunnels, both would have completely closed within a few decades. Glaciologists calculated that whatever burrowed through to the 'gate must have done so sometime within the previous fifty years.”

“And that someone was you?” Vala asked.

“Took a little while,” O'Neill said, angling the jumper down.

“And a lot of naquadah,” Sam added. “But I ran the calculations before we left. We still have enough for the next leg.”

“Next leg?” The display on the HUD altered to show an enhanced illumination of the landscape—or more correctly, snowscape—which, apart from some rather attractive magnetic field lights in the sky, was in darkness. That's when she remembered that Earth rotated slightly off
its
access, and that this end of the planet was in winter.

“I recalibrated the force field to repel ice, in the same way that Dr. Radek Zelenka generated a force field around the Atlantis jumper to repel water,” Sam explained.

“Hang on a minute,” Cam said. “You said fifty years? Isn't this
1908?”

“I think that's where the 'next leg' comment comes in, but being one of those cultural references, I really couldn't say for certain,” Vala said, raising her eyebrows at Sam.

“Which means someone tunneled through the ice sometime around
1947-48,” she replied, smiling. “And since we know the Antarctic 'gate DHD doesn't have sufficient power to dial out--”

“We're using that to make a stop in 1947 to collect An and Loki,” Daniel finished..

“Actually, we dug down through it once in 1947, but that was
a different timeline, so it doesn't count,” O'Neill added. He
frowned
and glanced at Sam. “It doesn't, does it?”

She smiled and nodded, which Cam appeared to find infuriating.

The jumper slowed before plunging into a tunnel, to emerge a short time later in a pitch-black cavern illuminated only by the
craft's
headlights. Vala had been watching their progress and had not noticed that Sam had retrieved something until she slid it over her hand. “Ah...isn't that—?

“Yeah,” O'Neill said. “Carter?”

“Ready, sir.”

“Dial away.”

“Just out of curiosity, why are we collecting both An
and
Loki?”

“Because Loki has to survive so he can go on to feature in all those alien abduction stories that Teal'c likes so much,” Daniel said. “Once you heal the worst of his injuries, we'll beam him aboard his ship.”

“And by using the Antarctic 'gate,” Sam explained when they emerged from the other end of the wormhole to a considerably smaller cavern, “we haven't risked bumping into ourselves or anyone else.”

During the time it took to tunnel through the ice in what was presumably 1947, Vala detailed her perilous escape from the burning building and her rescue of Cam. She left out the bits about telling Howard all about the true state of affairs in the galaxy, until Daniel said, “Cthulhu?

“Who?”

“C'mon, Vala, we know you must have told Lovccraft about the Goa'uld and the Ori.”

“Me? Don't be silly. You know I'd never do anything like that.”

“It's okay, Vala.” Sam offered her a reassuring smile. “Lovecraft became a famous horror writer.”

“Really? Oh, well, in that case, K'thloo was this rather yukky creature with lots of tentacles around his mouth, that I stumbled across about a year or so after I'd managed to divest myself from Qetesh. Well, stumbled probably wasn't quite accurate so much as I borrowed something from him...”

CHAPTER FIFTY

“What...what is happening?” An asked.

Jack glanced over his shoulder at the Asgard lying prone on the jumper's cargo bay. “We finished here?” he asked Carter.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the Stargate, Sam?” Daniel asked.

“I scanned for naquadah,” she replied. “The Stargate is in the same military storage facility in DC that we found in 1968, and the DHD is in Moscow.”

The Asgard began to stir, and struggled to sit up. “Where... am
I?”

“Now, now, be a good little Asgard and stay still,” Vala admonished.
“I've got some nice green food for you, but you have to lay back and have a couple of red ones, first.”