The Ninth Chevron - Chapter 4

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Disclaimer: I do not own Stargate: SG-1, Atlantis or Universe, I am only playing in the world.

Previously: Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3

The Ninth Chevron - Chapter 4

Ori Supergate, above P3Y-229, June 2006

"If anyone can hear me, this is Lieutenant Colonel Carter. Please respond." Sam stared out into the darkness of infinity, but it was not empty. Angling her head to the right she could see the oblique shape of the Supergate, active, shining brightly in the void. To think of the event horizon of a regular Stargate as a pool made this a vast lake, easily a thousand meters across. Which made the four ships which only just barely fit through it truly colossal. Vastly bigger than any of the ships they so easily swatted out of the sky over four hours ago, except Kvasir's O'Neill-class ship, which still succumbed to their combined firepower in the end. The debris of those ships filled her vision from one end to the other. The jagged remnants of so many vessels. She could only see one Ha'tak still intact of the thirteen that started the battle, though it was adrift and looked dead, and she'd watched one of the 304s rip itself apart from a huge internal explosion after an Ori beam weapon tore right through its shields and cut through its hull like tissue paper, she had no idea where the second one was. She was lucky that the battle itself took place far enough away from her that none of that debris was travelling in her direction. However, she was likely to die here of asphyxiation within the next two hours. It was horrific and she was alone.

She closed her eyes. She didn't want to think about the battle. She was fairly certain it had been the Korolev which had exploded, that meant she'd lost Cam and Daniel, the odds Teal'c was alive and on that intact Ha'tak were vanishingly small. Unless that second 304 returned she was likely to join them. Still, she would try until her life support ran out.

"This is Lieutenant Colonel Carter. I'm in a spacesuit drifting free, approximately two thousand feet off the front right position on the Supergate." Her comm cut off with a pop and she waited a few moments for the reply she wasn't sure would ever come. However there was a strangled, distorted, static sound which played through her ear piece, she unconsciously tilted her head as if trying to angle it to better hear the sound. Again a static pop and thump then a voice.

"-am, it's m- ... Mitchell. Can ... hear me?" Oh my God, oh my God, ohmygodohmygod. Cam was alive. She broke out in a smile and let out a breath from her now giddy lungs as she felt her heart beating faster.

"I can't tell you how good it is to hear your voice." Her eyes were stinging and she had to blink several times to regain any composure. She hadn't realised how afraid she had been until the pall lifted from her so suddenly when she heard Cam's voice.

"Yeah, you too." She heard the relief in his voice. He wasn't able to hide it at all.

"I saw the Korolev explode." Were they on the Ha'tak? Did they ring aboard it before the 304 was destroyed? Cam's voice cut in and out over the radio, as if he was turning his head from side to side or moving away from the audio pick up.

"I had just got to the ... bay to take a 302 out when the whole sh- ... lurched underneath me, I think the anti-grav started fai- ... 'cause it felt like we were listing, if you ... believe that. I just managed to get into a 302 and started her up when the whole thing blew up behind me." Halfway through his story she heard a couple of loud thumps and the audio cleared up, he must have fixed it with the good old Mk. I Wrench, his fist banging on the radio. "A blastwave hit me from behind and tossed me around some, I must have lost consciousness." His voice was low and husky as he got to the end, she could tell he was thinking the same thing she was.

"Daniel?" she asked. Dreading the answer he was going to give.

"Still on board… I think." She smiled sadly at his equivocation. Tilting her head forward inside her helmet as much as she could she was trying not to cry. It wasn't a good idea in a space suit. Anyway it was Daniel. If anyone could come back from the dead it was him. He'd done it twice.

Nearly two hours later, after they had been hailed by a returning Odyssey and Cam had landed his 302, they were still nowhere near beaming her back on board. She'd heard Cam reporting a failure on their latest test and the short exchange between him and the Asgard, Kvasir, who it seems had managed to beam himself aboard Odyssey before his ship was destroyed.

"Time for Plan B." Oh no. They had really awful luck with Plan Bs. Oddly enough Plan Cs and Ds fared a hell of a lot better.

"Uh, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, it won't work." If she knew Cam, and she knew Cam, this Plan B would be as spectacular as it was crazy and she just knew what it was going to be, even as she heard his voice come back to her over the radio.

"Hang on, Sam. We're coming to get you." She gritted her teeth in frustration. Sometimes she hated being so smart. Cam was going to try the impossible. That was his standard Plan B, so now she was staring at the low-slung head-on profile of an incoming BC-304.

"Oh boy." she muttered. She cringed and her toes curled in her boots as she saw Odyssey get bigger and bigger before her and he was still many minutes away. He was a great pilot, give him anything with a stick and maneuverability and he'd do amazing things with it. That was why she'd recommended him for the 302 program. He was a natural born pilot, but a 304 was most emphatically not a 302! "Look, the sub-light engines don't have that much control. If you hit me, even at minimum velocity…"

"I'm not going to hit you, Sam." He spoke the words with far more confidence than she felt. Then she heard him mutter something under his breath. "Not on purpose." Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God! Cameron Daniel Mitchell if I die here, like this, I won't come back to haunt you. I. WILL. KILL. YOU. She turned her head as one of the sensor spines on the nose of the massive ship flew past at a dizzying clip. This was not good. She could see every single pockmark on the hull, every lick of paint on the whitewashed U.S.A.F. logo on the side of the neck. Every single seam between the massive armour plates and all of it moving past her at a frightening pace. She looked ahead and saw the cavernous maw of the flight bay approaching her and she gulped when she remembered the transition between the zero gee of space and the artificial gravity aboard the ship.

"Even if you get me in past the shield, the artificial gravity will kick in. A fall from even thirty feet in this suit…" she began nervously, she was starting to babble. She was entrusting her life to a fighter jock who'd never flown anything larger than a Goa'uld cargo ship. And even then he let Vala and Teal'c do the piloting most of the time.

"Sam, stop worrying. Kvasir's riding the controls manually." Stop worrying? Stop worrying? He wasn't the one staring at an incoming juggernaut. He wasn't the one practically immobilised in a disabled space suit with only minutes of air left. Her heart was pounding so hard she was sure her mic was picking it up and relaying it to the bridge crew on Odyssey.

"You're going too fast." came Kvasir's stern warning followed by Cam's equally stern retort.

"This tub doesn't go any slower. Initializing five percent reverse thrust." This was its slowest speed? She was going to die! She saw a flash of blue start at her toes to encompass her feet then play up her legs and torso, then go over her arms and chest and head. She was inside the force field keeping the flight bay from the vacuum of space.

"Got her. Initializing twenty percent reverse thrust. Kvasir, take her down lightly." She could feel it start, it wasn't smooth, Terran engineered grav plating was still generations behind Asgard technologies and the transitions were like noticeable steps, each step making her feel heavier and bringing her down that little bit more quickly. The reverse thrust was well-timed, she was almost at rest relative to the deck below her when her heels made contact. Still, she'd been immobile in zero gee for over 6 hours and her knees were feeling weak. She twisted and buckled onto her side, her helmet hitting the deck and knocking her around a little. She sighed in relief. She'd never doubt Cam's piloting ability again. God she loved him. She blinked in surprise at that last thought.

Lakeway Airpark, Texas, Christmas Day 2008 (alternate timeline)

Cam looked out over the airfield and grinned as a smiling Sam came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and gave her a loving smile. She moved over to his side and buried her face in his neck before stepping back and walking towards the Cessna T182T he'd borrowed for the day as a Christmas gift to both Daniel and Sam.

"I'm not gonna hug you from behind... but thanks." The archaeologist's tone was amused and Cam turned to face him and clapped a hand on his shoulder, then they walked toward the tricycle geared turboprop as Sam opened the cabin door under its wing. She climbed in, using the rear landing gear as a step and took the pilot's seat for herself. Cam helped Daniel in and watched him take the co-pilot's place and he clambered in to take a seat in the back. He was the passenger today. That was his gift from them.

One of the things both he and Sam had insisted on when they were given new identities by the Air Force was clean and legal pilot's licenses. Something they'd then had doubled up thanks to Daniel's underworld connections. He found himself this small privately owned airfield on the outskirts of Austin and had managed to land himself a placing as a flying instructor on his own time, using the ID given to him by the Air Force. He'd managed to ditch his shadow with a story of going to Houston to look at a vintage 1967 Chevy Camaro SS while Sam and Daniel came into Lakeway using their underground IDs. As it was Sam doing the flying today, his name wouldn't even get onto any paperwork in connection with theirs, although it was his influence and request which got them this flight.

After pre-flight checks, Sam taxied to the end of the runway and was checking to make sure everyone was ready before take-off. She throttled up when she received clearance and smoothly pulled back on the stick to get them airborne and flying away from the airstrip nestled amid a cluster of houses, many of which included long driveways which connected to the runway itself for the residents who owned their own planes. Cam didn't own his own, but had come to know several of the residents well enough that they'd be happy to lend the affable Mitchell their plane for a little Christmas flight, even if he was from Kansas.

It was a quiet flight for each of them, the day was cool, though clear. The scenery beautiful and the view vast across the horizon. They'd been in this twisted version of their world for nearly five months, and though Sam had finished all the designs for the subspace communicator and had started assembling what parts she could months ago, they were still no closer to a solution, and their repeated attempts at convincing their handlers to allow them official contact with each other continued to fall on deaf ears. Daniel had helped brief the SEAL team tasked with retrieving the Telchak device, and Sam had been approached to help design a containment device as the Navy here were not of a mind to hand it over to aliens, as the SGC had handed it over to the Tok'ra in their own timeline. Daniel had been right about Cam's own skills, though many and varied, not being unique enough for his expertise to be called into service. He didn't hold out much hope.

After three hours of amiable chatting interspersed with companionable silence and contented scenery watching, they came back in for a landing, which Sam handled with aplomb. She taxied the plane back to the refuelling rig and they got out to take care of that and then return the plane to its owner. Daniel was looking about happily curious about all the different planes parked on the apron by the runway, while Sam and Cam turned to watch another Cessna throttle up for a take off.

"Is there a reason why all the tail numbers on these planes start with an 'N'?" asked Daniel, and the two Air Force officers looked at one another, amazed he couldn't guess the reason for himself.

Hypraxia Base, Praxyon, May 2010

Cam's head was splitting right down the middle, he was sure of it. His eyes flickered open and he let out a small dull gurgle of pain, breathing heavily with shuddering gasps. He'd never felt as awful as this waking up, even after the heaviest night of drinking. A wave of pain engulfed him and his muscles constricted involuntarily, the muscles and tendons in his neck bunched in stark relief in the half light from the flickering laptop screen saver he'd left on the night before. When he was able to breathe again he gulped in rasping breaths and the pain was gone. Just like that. He flopped back down into his bunk, breaths lurching and rattling in his chest, every muscle in his body slack and useless. He was frightened. The worst of it was he thought he knew why it had happened. He'd just woken up from a dream in which he was clearly remembering the alternate timeline created by Ba'al's interference with the time continuum. This was definitely one of those 'impossible things before breakfast' he'd heard about, except he'd done it and not simply believed in it. The dream itself didn't seem too special. A fun day spent with friends, flying, talking shop, educating Daniel about planes and flying. He froze. Educating Daniel about aviation.

He bolted out of his bunk and quickly put on his BDUs, rushing for the door and down the hall to Sam's quarters, just as he got to her door he caught sight of Daniel rounding the corner in just some sweat pants and the archaeologist skidded to a stop when he caught sight of the Air Force officer. Just then the doors to the room Sam had commandeered on base slid open and she almost ran into Cam, he grabbed at her shoulders as she recoiled from the near-collision to keep her from falling backwards over the lip of the door back into her room. His hands nestled on the bare skin of her upper arm as she raised a hand to cover her heart over her black tank top. She gasped in surprise and laughed ruefully as she shook out her sleep tousled locks.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see you two here." She eyed them appraisingly, as Daniel walked forward towards them. Cam looked at him and the sight of his friend's eyes told him everything he needed to know. They all three spoke in unison.

"Tail numbers."

Hypraxia Base, Praxyon, May 2010

"I see." Dr. Nicholas Rush said from Sgt. Ellison's mouth. "We dialled Destiny when she was in realspace though." He was looking at several graphs with overlaid statistics.

"And you were lucky you did, or the connection would never have worked." Sam pointed out, indicating a particular section of the graph. "I know she doesn't use hyperspace to travel at FTL speeds but she still utilises the higher order dimensions, and the way they were being used in the previous version of the dialling software wouldn't have worked at all."

"This place is pretty cool." At the sound of Airman Acheson's voice Cam turned away from the two scientists discussing things he'd only understand in dreams, and when he dreamt about Sam he'd prefer it if she weren't explaining hyperspace physics to him, although, that could be kinda sexy. Still! Acheson! Or Eli Wallace at a consciousness level.

"Yeah, you could say that, Eli." He liked the guy, even stuck at the other end of the universe he was pretty sanguine.

"And you say it monitors stellar activity in stars all across the galaxy?" He was staring up at the projected stars orbiting haphazardly at the top of the central pillar. "Any particular reason?"

"I don't know why the Ancients did at first, but I do know what you can do with it." He turned back to look at Sam at the control console, remembering the tape he'd left for himself. "You can watch for solar flares, and then use their magnetic fields to slingshot a wormhole through time." He looked back to Eli to see the amazement on his face. He grinned.

"It's a time machine?" His voice was a high pitched squeak.

"I know a DeLorean would have been cooler..." Cam teased and Eli waved him off.

"No, no this is still... this is a time machine?" Clearly flabbergasted.

"Yeah, a version of me used it to go back to 1929 to avert a Goa'uld plot to destroy Earth." Cam rubbed the back of head.

"A version of you?" Eli looked confused.

"Yeah, well, I didn't do it physically myself, and the me that did lived out his life in this timeline after he fixed everything so it kinda sorta never happened." There was a reason he didn't like to talk about it.

"So time isn't a strict progression of cause and effect." Eli breathed.

"Nope," Cam moved his hands in front of his face as if rolling around an orb between them, "it's a ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff." Eli laughed. Cam smiled. "I wish there were a way to transfer data through this connection."

"I know, my TiVo must think I abandoned it." He sighed and turned back to the two scientists still going over the graphs. "She was the captain of the ship that took me to Icarus Base."

"Yeah, Colonel Carter was assigned command of the Hammond for that mission. Now she's back home with SG-1." He smiled proudly.

"I have to admit, she's kinda-" He was cut off by a finger raised in front of his nose.

"Don't finish that thought, Eli. I don't want to have to explain to the Airman why his arms are broken." Cam intoned with a stony warning glance.

"Indeed." Teal'c breathed from directly behind Eli, the young man yelped and jumped, surprised to find over six feet of muscled Jaffa staring at him balefully and not knowing where he'd come from.

"I got it, T-man. Eli's gonna keep a respectful tongue in his mouth when he's around me," he smiled and wrapped an arm around the kid, "aren't ya, Eli?" Sometimes it was fun rattling the young'uns. Eli nodded, glancing at Teal'c nervously until he nodded to Cam and moved away, still eyeing the younger man. "Don't sweat it, kid, we're just yanking your chain... mostly." His smile was genuine and it seemed to placate the younger man. "Still, it would be better if you didn't... not around me anyway." He patted the other man on the back. Eli stared at him for several moments.

"I get it." He nodded. Cam nodded. Settled.

"Don't be so hard on the boy, Cameron. I'm sure you were the same when you were his age." Vala passed by them both with a smile and a wave to Eli which the young man returned.

"I have to admit, she's kinda-" He was cut off by a finger raised in front of his nose. Again.

"Don't finish that thought either, Eli, at least not in front of Jackson." Cam warned him.

"Indeed." Teal'c startled the young man even worse this time around. Mere inches behind him as he spoke and no sound to indicate when he'd arrived.

"I swear! I'll be good!" He put both hands up and Teal'c raised an eyebrow before walking away. "You should really put a bell on him or something."

"What, and miss out on freaking out the newbies?" Cam grinned. "Don't think so." He settled back into watching Sam work. He could do that all day. "So what made you think the last symbol was a code and not just the Point of Origin symbol?"

"Well, to be honest, I knew it wasn't the formula, so I figured the problem had to be the address." His eyes went unfocused for a while and Cam figured he must have been remembering the briefing Sam and Daniel had given him and Dr. Rush when they'd arrived. The youngster had gotten a real kick out of meeting the Dr. Daniel Jackson from his orientation videos. "We were lucky. I mean really lucky. If what Colonel Carter said is true, and looking over her simulations I'd have to say it is, the fact we actually managed to dial Destiny at all is a miracle, that the only thing that did it was me forcing Dr. Rush to use Earth's symbol as the Point of Origin like it was listed in the Ancient database..." The young man shuddered. "I was right but for the wrong reasons. If she'd been in FTL at the time, we'd be dead." Sam was walking towards them while Dr. Rush continued to study the graphs.

"It's funny you should mention Earth's Point of Origin symbol. The one you used wasn't Earth's original symbol. The Alpha 'gate was transplanted onto Earth by Ra only ten thousand years ago." Sam was smiling, clearly enjoying being in lecture mode. "The Beta 'gate's symbol is more like an octagon with a long, thick bar under it. That was the 'gate the Ancients used when they lived on Earth millions of years ago."

"Why would a planet need more than one Stargate?" asked Eli.

"It wouldn't, but the Point of Origin doesn't identify a planet, it identifies a Stargate. Like a unique ID it can leave behind when it dials other 'gates." The back of her hand brushed Cam's and he smiled at her gently. "Also, it is used to help keep the two 'gates in synch while the connection is active, it's all relative to the fixed point of any Stargate network, in our case the galactic core, the DHD software at both ends helps to manage power, it makes the wormholes very reliable. The Ninth Chevron requires completely different software to make connections, the dialling DHD is responsible for all power management which is why it is so difficult to make the connection stable, and it uses itself as the fixed point for the frame of reference so all its work can be done with only the destination as a variable."

"So the Ninth Chevron is a Stargate network for ships essentially." Dr. Rush had joined them at last. "And we were unlucky enough to be able to connect to one on the other side of the known universe."

"We didn't know about the other addresses before your tests, Dr. Rush, you would have been the first to find out." Sam looked apologetic.

"I know, Colonel. What's done is done however, we can only try to find a way home. Supplies from the SGC by Stargate would go a long way to improving our situation, but from your notes I see you're still some way away from that." Rush was indicating her simulations playing in a loop on the monitor behind them.

"Yes, Destiny is so far away, and the power requirements to dial her so huge that we're having trouble with every simulation we run. It's not a lack of power, it's getting it all to the 'gate and doing it safely." She sighed and looked around her at the base. "This place, amazing as it is, was never designed to dial a 'gate outside this galaxy." Eli looked somewhat crestfallen for a while, before brightening up.

"Still, you're close, and if the other nine symbol addresses are closer you might be able to find something that can help." Eli looked between Rush and Sam. Cam looked at Sam for a while and ran a finger up her forearm when the look of thoughtful disappointment hadn't left her eyes. She glanced at him at his touch before turning back to the other two.

"Yes, we're close, and we're doing all we can, please believe us." she said earnestly.

"Do you have a way to test the hyperspace connection?" Dr. Rush asked as he looked between them both.

"Yeah, we have an idea about that." Cam replied, smiling at Sam.

On to Chapter 5