STARGATE SG-1 STARGATE ATLANTIS: Points of Origin - Volume Two of the Travelers' Tales (SGX-03) (STARGATE EXTRA (SGX-03)) Page 3

  But he was no tactical genius. He wrote no notable books, formulated no key doctrine. And he was old fashioned, a little out of step with the modern Air Force. His notions of solitary heroics and small teams didn’t fit in the post-Vietnam military, where everything was about making technology smarter and humans less engaged. Leading thinkers expounded that the future of the Air Force was in unmanned satellites and orbital gun platforms — you wouldn’t even need pilots, just controllers on the ground who made decisions by committee that were carried out by computers. George was out of touch. A good guy, but not one who had what it took.

  Of course Jake got derailed too. His wife died suddenly in an accident while he was at Tyndall AFB in Florida, and he stepped back from the flight line voluntarily. A single father couldn’t take those kinds of risks. George sent flowers but didn’t go to the funeral. He was in South Korea then, a liaison post that you could take your family with you. The girls loved Korea.

  The first time he was passed over for his star he wasn’t surprised. He knew how it worked. He knew that was for men (or women, now) who had distinguished themselves. He hadn’t. He was solid. He had no blemishes on his record, not except a mistake that had let some prisoners escape years ago, the carelessness of a young lieutenant, but being solid wasn’t enough. Sometimes he thought about them. Sometimes he wondered. Did he remember what had really happened? Or was it, like Mary Anne thought, something he’d dreamed up floating in that lifejacket waiting for the Santa Fe to pick him up?

  “You’d had a head injury and the brain does funny things under pressure,” she’d said. “Sometimes you come up with reasons to stay alive. You come up with reasons to survive. Maybe you imagined that you had met a time traveler who told you that you were going to live thirty years more. It’s a good strategy. You can’t die because you have a destiny.”

  “It worked,” George had said.

  “It did,” she replied, and put her arms around him. “And I’m glad it did, because if you’d died I would never have met you. You told yourself a story to stay alive.”

  And maybe that was it. Maybe that was what had happened. He’d imagined a science fiction story like the ones he read and cast himself as the hero. He’d persuaded himself that he couldn’t die because he had a destiny.

  George was in Alaska while war swept across the Gulf, pushing papers while Instant Thunder roared. Tactical commands went to other people, and by now he wasn’t surprised. That was a game for go-getters and the politically well connected, for the grown-up wonderkids who’d embraced strategic bombing, or for commanders in Powell’s cautious mode. He was neither. He was beginning to seem as antique as the Phantoms on display at various aviation museums, living history.

  He got his star in ’91, the same year Mary Anne was diagnosed with cancer. She never quite saw it. Congress confirmed right after she died. Some might say it took the heart out of him, but it didn’t. He was just as meticulous as before. He was just as steady. George Hammond didn’t make mistakes. You could count on him. His superiors always did. Calculated risks, careful planning, always keeping his people out of trouble — that was George Hammond.

  Jennifer got married in ’95, when he was in California closing down an air base that was being sold as a commercial property. It wasn’t needed anymore. It was surplus. The runway was too short for modern jets and it wasn’t worth it to update it. Sometimes you just had to let things go. You just had to recognize that the world had moved on.

  The girls were gone, off having lives of their own. Emily was getting her doctorate. Jennifer had a daughter of her own, his first grandbaby. He’d retire in a few years, thirty years and more in the blue suit, since he’d answered Kennedy’s call to space, dreaming of adventure and saving the world. If time travel wasn’t real, he’d made his peace with it. It had served its purpose.

  And he had served his. A good career, a decent career. He’d done more good than harm, and that’s all you can ever expect. He’d take his thirty years and be proud, even if he’d never gotten to the virgin moon.

  Cheyenne Mountain, July 10, 1997

  General George Hammond stared down at the folder in his hands, sitting at the battered general issue desk in his office in a closing facility. Captain Samantha Carter looked up at him on glossy paper, her face as solemn as it had been mobile in his memory. He remembered it well. It was a face he had remembered for a long time, the face of one of the spies he’d helped escape.

  Her latest letter was clipped in the front of the file. He skimmed all her carefully worded arguments. She should come back to the program. She had a doctorate in astrophysics. She was eager to research the Stargate, even if the program was being shut down. Could she at least have a few months? She was sure there was some application that might be attempted.

  Captain Samantha Carter. It had been twenty-eight years since he’d seen her, since she’d told him her name. At least it had been twenty-eight years for him. For her it hadn’t happened yet.

  The world twisted, a Moebius strip of paradoxes that made everything make sense. There are lots of Carters in the world, and Samantha was a popular name in the sixties, but she was Jake’s little girl, the one he hadn’t seen since she was a toddler. That Samantha Carter. He’d released her because she had a note from him and she’d told him he’d be a general. He’d saved her father’s life because of that certainty. Now she’d followed her father into the Air Force and was certain she could make the Stargate work.

  Of course she could. She had. If she hadn’t, neither of them would be here. She would make it work, and she would use it to go back in time.

  George’s hand shook as he picked up the telephone. He dialed the number and greeted the aide politely, went through the commander of Nellis AFB, waited patiently while someone fetched Captain Carter from whatever lab they’d stuck her in. George had waited a long time. He could wait ten minutes for someone to come to the phone.

  “This is Captain Carter.” It was the same voice he remembered, noise in the background, as though she’d taken the phone in a busy hangar.

  “Captain, this is General Hammond. I’ve been put in charge of the Stairway to Heaven. I’ve got your letter here and I have a question. Do you think there’s any way to use this for temporal displacement?”

  He heard her breath, and the suppressed excitement in her tone, though she tried to keep it steady. “That might be possible, sir. We don’t really know. General West was interested only in spatial displacement. We didn’t delve very deeply into other applications at all.”

  “But you do think temporal displacement is a possibility?” he asked.

  “I think it’s a possibility, sir.” He could hear her swallow. “We don’t really know enough about the device to be certain about all its applications. It’s possible that further experiments…”

  “Good,” George cut her off. “Then you’ll work on that as soon as you get back here, Captain.” He hung up before she could thank him over and over, closed the folder and went down to the echoing chamber below.

  The Stargate waited, shrouded in its drop cloths, a silent, empty ring. Empty, yes, but it was not a dead end. It wasn’t a door that led nowhere. He looked up at the gray beams above, the dim lights and pitted concrete, his heart swelling as though to music only he could hear. One day soon it would flare to life. One day soon they’d step through into something unimaginable. It was all real, and anything was possible.

  George Hammond had a date with the future.

  Stargate Atlantis

  Cotermino(us)

  Peter J Evans

  “Hello? Can you tell me your name?”

  He blinked, momentarily confused. The words seemed to come out of nowhere, strange and frightening, emerging from a hazy darkness to startle him awake. He turned, trying to find their source, but the world was off its moorings, tipping and spinning about him. He h
ad to grab the edge of the gurney with both hands to avoid falling off.

  Something was wrapped around his arm, rubbery and entirely artificial. He stared down at it.

  “Hey! I need to you to focus.”

  “I’m fine.” He shook himself. “Just tired, is all. Been a long day.”

  The world was already solidifying, sharpening into angular panels of ochre and dull silver. He could see chrome, hovering rectangles of blue-white light, a bulky crimson figure with a glass face.

  It was Keller, completely encased in a hazmat suit, peering through her visor with an expression that was half grief-stricken, half resigned. Why did she look so sad?

  “Please tell me your name,” she whispered.

  “John Sheppard, same as every other time you’ve asked.” Her gloved hand was still around his arm. He pulled himself free, as gently as he could. “Do you want my rank and service number too?”

  Keller sighed. “No, that’s all right.” She straightened up, the suit’s rubberized fabric creaking almost comically. “Sorry, didn’t mean to snap at you. I just thought, maybe this time…”

  “This time?”

  “Never mind. But try to stay with me, okay? You keep drifting.”

  “Heard every word, doc.” He was lying, of course. His attention had been on the observation deck, high above him, and on the two figures standing there.

  They were gone now, and the deck was empty and silent. He nodded upwards, at the space they had occupied. “Who was that?”

  “Who was who?”

  “Up there. A man and a woman, they were watching us.” He hadn’t been able to see their faces, but there was an unsettling familiarity to them. Just before Keller had spoken to him, Sheppard had seen the man raise his right hand, a faltering, awkward gesture that could have been anything from a greeting to a signal for silence.

  Probably medical staff, he decided. After all, he had been under observation since his return from the city.

  He got up. It was very late, and the isolation room was in half-darkness, the paneled walls almost lost to shadow. The only light came from Keller’s visor and the banks of flatscreen monitors set up around the bed. It was a cold, disorientating place, too tall and wide, full of unnecessary angles. Little wonder he had suffered a moment of dizziness.

  “Look, doc, there’s nothing wrong with me. Not that a good night’s sleep won’t fix.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” She folded her arms awkwardly. “You’ve been through a lot. We don’t know anything about where you’ve been, or what happened while you were there. I can’t just —”

  “Am I sick?”

  Her expression darkened. “No,” she breathed.

  “And I’m not injured. I’m just too tired to think straight.”

  “I hope so. Let me do a few more tests to make sure.”

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “Can I at least grab a coffee first?”

  The sky above him was clear blue and painfully bright. Towards the horizon, thready clouds glittered pinkly against the climbing sun. There was a wind blowing in off the sea, sharp and cool, and he could hear the whisper and slap of waves far below.

  He cupped a hand to his brow, squinting at the sunrise. “Morning?”

  “Morning.”

  He turned, saw Sam Carter walking across the pier towards him. He raised his coffee mug. “I was just wondering where the night went.”

  “Doctor Keller said you were exhausted. Do you remember going to bed?”

  “I don’t even remember getting up.”

  “Glad to see you’re on your feet again, anyway.” She stopped alongside him, stood gazing out over the sea. “Was it like this?”

  “The city?” He shook his head. “No, nothing like this at all. It was…”

  He paused. The details were hazy. Trying to pin them down was like holding droplets of mercury; the more he tried to grasp them, the quicker they slipped between his fingers. Not for the first time, he found himself chasing memories through the corridors of his mind, but the effort was exhausting, physically painful. Within seconds a dull ache had begun to beat behind his eyes. “Darker. A lot more enclosed, but somehow bigger. I don’t remember seeing the sky there at all.”

  Carter frowned at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Just a headache.”

  “You know, if your arm’s still giving you trouble, there’s no shame in going back to Keller.”

  “My arm?” He lifted his left hand, turned it experimentally. “There’s nothing wrong with my arm. You’re sure you don’t mean Teyla?”

  “I thought your initial report mentioned an injury.” She looked unsure. “I must have remembered it wrong.”

  He grinned at her, ruefully, over the mug’s steaming rim. “Yeah, well. Given how messed up I was when I came back, my initial report is subject to change without notice.” Sheppard could see that the answer didn’t satisfy her. She was worried about him, about everyone who had ventured into the alien city, and with good reason. Whatever had happened there, it had affected him in more ways than he could comfortably name.

  “Listen, just give me a few hours. Some gym time, a gallon or two of this…“ He downed the last of the mug’s contents. “I’ll have it all clear inside eight hours.”

  Carter gazed at him strangely for a few moments, then nodded. “Very well. But I’m going to need a solid report by then at the latest. The IOA have gotten wind of what happened, and they’re asking questions about that city I can’t begin to answer.” She folded her arms. “Right now, we can’t even agree on why you were there in the first place.”

  There was a howling in the city, faint but unceasing, like the raging of a distant storm. Sheppard had been hearing it ever since he’d arrived. For hours now it had been his perpetual soundtrack. It had counterpointed his every action, punctuated every word he said. He was already convinced that, should he somehow find his way out of the city’s confines, the howling would simply follow him. Its endless lament had crept into the dark cavern of his skull, and he would never be free of it.

  More maddening than the sound itself, though, was Sheppard’s complete inability to determine its source. It certainly wasn’t due to an actual wind, at least not one close enough to feel. The city’s air remained utterly motionless, flat and unmoving. As lifeless, he would find himself thinking in unguarded moments, as the miasma lurking within a closed coffin.

  He scowled, pushed the thought away. The city was unnerving enough, without adding mental images of premature burial. He took a lungful of the dead air, just to prove to himself that he could. “Anything?”

  Ronon Dex shook his head. “Looks clear.”

  Teyla Emmagan padded past Sheppard, moving silently across the chamber, brushing its black walls with her fingertips. She peered cautiously down each of the channel openings as she them passed by. “I am sure I saw something move,” she whispered.

  “Bring it on,” Dex muttered. “Haven’t spotted so much as a bug since we got here.”

  For a moment, Sheppard found himself almost agreeing with the Satedan. He and his companions had been negotiating the city’s labyrinths for longer than he liked to recall, and in all that time he had not seen one single hint of life.

  Sheppard had been in dead places before — tombs, long-abandoned spacecraft, the aftermath of battle — but none of them had the utter, endless sterility of the vast structure surrounding him. Even corpses, he knew from bitter experience, drew flies.

  There were no flies in the city. There were no plants, no moving water, no mechanisms or enemies. No doors or windows, curves or color. Just an insane, unspeakable sprawl of channels and their connecting chambers.

  Every channel he had encountered had been identical; a narrow, empty space between two vast walls of black stone, so tall that their upper
limits — if they even had limits — were lost to darkness. The channels were perfectly straight, their walls smooth, vertical, unbroken by the slightest flaw or feature. Each ended in a small polyhedral chamber, which connected to more channels and so-on, in endless, unceasing progression.

  The number of channels accessible from each chamber varied, but only in multiples of three.

  With utter darkness above him, and no movement of the air, Sheppard had no way of knowing whether he stood beneath a distant ceiling or a starless sky. His only light came from below, spilling out of hair-fine spaces between the walls and the seamless floor, a nauseating grey glow that made him feel as though the city was upside-down, flipped over to leave him clinging to the ceiling.

  He was the insect here, he realized. “Come on. Let’s keep going.”

  “John, I know what I saw.” Teyla moved closer to him, her face ghostly in the pale, inverted light. “We are not alone.”

  “Okay,” he said, trying to sound more hopeful than he felt. “Maybe it knows the layout.”

  Dex nodded. “I say we go after it. Make it tell us how to get out.”

  Teyla seemed unsure. “What if it’s dangerous?”

  “Never stopped us before.” He turned, began to stalk away down a channel, his shoulders brushing the walls as he went.

  Sheppard sighed, then set off after him, making sure Teyla was close behind. He had long since given up on navigating the city’s pathways by any logical means. He had tried marking the walls, but nothing he carried would scratch them or stick to them. Besides, he had the distinct impression that the structure of the place was shifting around him. Even if he did manage to retrace his steps, he had no proof that the path behind him would be the same going back as it had been moving forwards.