The woman who circumnavigated the universe in a ship of her own making
Title: The woman who circumnavigated the universe in a ship of her own making
Author: ardvari
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Beta: A huge, gigantic thank you goes to supplyship for helping me unravel the mess this was when I first wrote it.
A/N: I read The girl who circumnavigated fairyland in a ship of her own making, and adapted the title for this story because it seemed fitting. Concrit, as always, welcome!
The woman who circumnavigated the universe in a ship of her own making
There are few things Sam remembers from her early childhood. Like most people, those early memories blur against the backdrop of a busy adult life, take on an almost surreal quality, full of wonders and cookies and dozing beneath trees.
Sometimes when she closes her eyes, she can hear the wind rustling the leaves on the tree in her family’s backyard, sounding exactly like rain falling in thick drops.
Another thing she remembers is the feel of her father’s uniform against her bare arms when he came back from deployment and lifted her up. She’d still been small enough to fit easily into his arms, to feel entirely safe even though his medals poked her in the belly. Medals she stroked reverently, just the tip of her index finger mapping them out.
(She liked his uniform, liked the formality of it. When she was five, her father was promoted from Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel, and it took her a couple of months to truly grasp what “full bird” meant. Full bird sounded like a perfect description of what her mother did to a turkey on Thanksgiving.)
So if Sam’s early memories are blurry, they are punctuated by those moments when her father had to leave and those when he comes back.
Her mother rarely left, and never for as long as her father, and when she didn’t come back at all, Sam’s world shifts. The cookie sheet clattering to the ground, spilling cookies everywhere sounds like one chapter of her life ending and another one starting.
They all go through the motions after her mother’s death, Sam, her father, and her brother. She goes to school, wins the science fair, and spends endless summer vacations at home, where the air conditioning sometimes cuts out and she opens the window in her room so wide that, when it rains, there are puddles on her desk.
That’s about the time, she thinks, when she starts looking up for answers. When her father withdraws and her brother is moody and sullen, when there won’t be cookies for a while because she can’t bring herself to bake them. She looks up and finds stars, and recognizes science.
While her structured life unravels, she grabs on to this new structure, to the possibilities that lie within the solar system, the galaxy, the universe perhaps. She wants all of it, and if she was truly romantic she’d say that perhaps she was reaching for the stars.
And then she works towards them. Towards NASA and the shuttle program, working meticulously to put some sort of order back into her life with a PhD and the Air Force. She’s no longer tumbling and falling, she’s building this life for herself that she can dive into, that will hold her when nothing else does.
Last week, swimming up out of Earth’s atmosphere in a spaceship designed for intergalactic travel, she glimpsed the International Space Station, caught the glare of the sun hitting its array of solar panels. When she was seven, her father had brought her an astronaut’s suit for Halloween. Orange and full of mysterious buckles, with the NASA emblem on her chest, she’d stood among her friends dressed as princesses and witches, and had felt both left out and vindicated somehow. This was the kind of person she wanted to be, one that sat in front of a blue background, smiling winningly at the camera before she flew off into space to service the ISS. And now she’s left that dream behind, the dream of becoming a “traditional” astronaut, for a top secret project involving stable wormholes in space.
She signed her non-disclosure agreement fourteen years ago, and if she ever thought her life lacked order before, after her mother’s death, it definitely borders on chaos the moment she steps through the Stargate for the first time. Maybe even the moment she heard about it for the first time, sitting at the Pentagon and believing, for just a second, that the world had come to a screeching halt.
It’s been a wild ride full of discoveries and heartbreak, full of friends who die and are back in time for Christmas, and friends who die and stay dead.
Now she’s on this spaceship, piloting it to the outer reaches of the galaxy on yet another mission to bring supplies and peace. This is her home, this ship. It’s not Prometheus, the ship she developed the blueprints for, the one she could take apart and put back together in her sleep. No, this one is more evolved; it’s her design with more added features, like a .2 version of the Prometheus. And yet it’s hers, more so than anything else. She knows the sounds it makes, knows how many shots it can take before the shields fail.
Sam Carter has a lot of time to think while she’s flying through the universe at the kind of speed that most people can’t even grasp. Most people get thrilled by going 80mph; they have trouble comprehending the speed of light. Hyper speed is so far beyond them it seems impossible. It seems like something straight out of a science fiction novel, an idea of people dreaming to move faster, always faster towards their goals.
Flying through the eternal darkness of space, she plots her courses, drops out of hyperspace so that a team of scientists can study the Dark Horse Nebula. She helps them, immerses herself in the science she used to love, still loves. The universe isn’t just this incomprehensible thing to her; it’s something she can grasp, something she can understand. It’s more predictable than people and she needs something she can rely on.
She’s always cold on the ship, not a day goes by where she doesn’t shiver, bare feet touching the metal floor when she gets up, her toes curling up defensively. Most of the time she’s on the Hammond for three months, then she gets a week on Earth, and then she flies off again. When she comes back to Earth during the summer, she can feel her body opening like a flower, can feel the sun warming her skin all the way down to her bones. This sunshine always has to last her a while. The next time she’ll be on Earth it’ll be fall, and possibly raining.
During the first few weeks of deployment they all got antsy, locked up in this giant, pressurized metal can. They all went a little loopy; snapping at each other, trying to find places to work where there was no one else, where they could have some peace and quiet. The constant hum the ship emanates follows them everywhere. It’s the kind of white noise she almost needs to fall asleep now; it’s like falling asleep on your lover’s chest to the reassuring sound of their heartbeat. The Hammond hums her to sleep.
She sometimes thinks about her father’s funeral. There’d been an urn sitting on a table, one that was empty, a fact only she knew about. Everyone else had cried over her father’s supposedly cremated remains, while she’d sat, stoically, and wondered on which planet the Tok’ra had buried him. There’d be no cross, no mark for him out there. There’s a cross here, on Earth, though she’s never been there, doesn’t see the point in visiting an empty grave. She’s closer to her father when she’s flying through space than she ever could be on Earth.
It’s amazing to think about how far she’s come. She’s gone too far to measure her life in astronomical units, too far to think about it in purely scientific terms. She’s saved Earth countless times, liberated the galaxy twice. She’s lost friends, and found new ones. She’s happy, flying this ship, despite the fact that her flight suit is green, not orange. The shuttle program was shut down a year ago and yet she’s still out here when, in another life, she might have been Earth-bound with no sure way back to the reaches of space. Content perhaps, but always, always looking up, wondering about the possibilities out there. Now she gets to live those possibilities.
When she’s on Earth, the stars pull at her heartstrings and she’s restless, always looking up the way she used to, itching to get back out there again. She can close her eyes and still see the patterns of the stars; they’re her map, they’ve always, without fail, guided her home. She’s lived among them for so long that she feels untethered when she’s standing on solid ground. She’s settled firmly in the cradle of space, its endlessness wrapped around her shoulders like a blanket. She can’t imagine her life any other way, can’t imagine what it would be like to be on Earth, look up at the night sky and not know what kinds of secrets and memories the universe holds.
Author: ardvari
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Beta: A huge, gigantic thank you goes to supplyship for helping me unravel the mess this was when I first wrote it.
A/N: I read The girl who circumnavigated fairyland in a ship of her own making, and adapted the title for this story because it seemed fitting. Concrit, as always, welcome!
The woman who circumnavigated the universe in a ship of her own making
There are few things Sam remembers from her early childhood. Like most people, those early memories blur against the backdrop of a busy adult life, take on an almost surreal quality, full of wonders and cookies and dozing beneath trees.
Sometimes when she closes her eyes, she can hear the wind rustling the leaves on the tree in her family’s backyard, sounding exactly like rain falling in thick drops.
Another thing she remembers is the feel of her father’s uniform against her bare arms when he came back from deployment and lifted her up. She’d still been small enough to fit easily into his arms, to feel entirely safe even though his medals poked her in the belly. Medals she stroked reverently, just the tip of her index finger mapping them out.
(She liked his uniform, liked the formality of it. When she was five, her father was promoted from Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel, and it took her a couple of months to truly grasp what “full bird” meant. Full bird sounded like a perfect description of what her mother did to a turkey on Thanksgiving.)
So if Sam’s early memories are blurry, they are punctuated by those moments when her father had to leave and those when he comes back.
Her mother rarely left, and never for as long as her father, and when she didn’t come back at all, Sam’s world shifts. The cookie sheet clattering to the ground, spilling cookies everywhere sounds like one chapter of her life ending and another one starting.
They all go through the motions after her mother’s death, Sam, her father, and her brother. She goes to school, wins the science fair, and spends endless summer vacations at home, where the air conditioning sometimes cuts out and she opens the window in her room so wide that, when it rains, there are puddles on her desk.
That’s about the time, she thinks, when she starts looking up for answers. When her father withdraws and her brother is moody and sullen, when there won’t be cookies for a while because she can’t bring herself to bake them. She looks up and finds stars, and recognizes science.
While her structured life unravels, she grabs on to this new structure, to the possibilities that lie within the solar system, the galaxy, the universe perhaps. She wants all of it, and if she was truly romantic she’d say that perhaps she was reaching for the stars.
And then she works towards them. Towards NASA and the shuttle program, working meticulously to put some sort of order back into her life with a PhD and the Air Force. She’s no longer tumbling and falling, she’s building this life for herself that she can dive into, that will hold her when nothing else does.
Last week, swimming up out of Earth’s atmosphere in a spaceship designed for intergalactic travel, she glimpsed the International Space Station, caught the glare of the sun hitting its array of solar panels. When she was seven, her father had brought her an astronaut’s suit for Halloween. Orange and full of mysterious buckles, with the NASA emblem on her chest, she’d stood among her friends dressed as princesses and witches, and had felt both left out and vindicated somehow. This was the kind of person she wanted to be, one that sat in front of a blue background, smiling winningly at the camera before she flew off into space to service the ISS. And now she’s left that dream behind, the dream of becoming a “traditional” astronaut, for a top secret project involving stable wormholes in space.
She signed her non-disclosure agreement fourteen years ago, and if she ever thought her life lacked order before, after her mother’s death, it definitely borders on chaos the moment she steps through the Stargate for the first time. Maybe even the moment she heard about it for the first time, sitting at the Pentagon and believing, for just a second, that the world had come to a screeching halt.
It’s been a wild ride full of discoveries and heartbreak, full of friends who die and are back in time for Christmas, and friends who die and stay dead.
Now she’s on this spaceship, piloting it to the outer reaches of the galaxy on yet another mission to bring supplies and peace. This is her home, this ship. It’s not Prometheus, the ship she developed the blueprints for, the one she could take apart and put back together in her sleep. No, this one is more evolved; it’s her design with more added features, like a .2 version of the Prometheus. And yet it’s hers, more so than anything else. She knows the sounds it makes, knows how many shots it can take before the shields fail.
Sam Carter has a lot of time to think while she’s flying through the universe at the kind of speed that most people can’t even grasp. Most people get thrilled by going 80mph; they have trouble comprehending the speed of light. Hyper speed is so far beyond them it seems impossible. It seems like something straight out of a science fiction novel, an idea of people dreaming to move faster, always faster towards their goals.
Flying through the eternal darkness of space, she plots her courses, drops out of hyperspace so that a team of scientists can study the Dark Horse Nebula. She helps them, immerses herself in the science she used to love, still loves. The universe isn’t just this incomprehensible thing to her; it’s something she can grasp, something she can understand. It’s more predictable than people and she needs something she can rely on.
She’s always cold on the ship, not a day goes by where she doesn’t shiver, bare feet touching the metal floor when she gets up, her toes curling up defensively. Most of the time she’s on the Hammond for three months, then she gets a week on Earth, and then she flies off again. When she comes back to Earth during the summer, she can feel her body opening like a flower, can feel the sun warming her skin all the way down to her bones. This sunshine always has to last her a while. The next time she’ll be on Earth it’ll be fall, and possibly raining.
During the first few weeks of deployment they all got antsy, locked up in this giant, pressurized metal can. They all went a little loopy; snapping at each other, trying to find places to work where there was no one else, where they could have some peace and quiet. The constant hum the ship emanates follows them everywhere. It’s the kind of white noise she almost needs to fall asleep now; it’s like falling asleep on your lover’s chest to the reassuring sound of their heartbeat. The Hammond hums her to sleep.
She sometimes thinks about her father’s funeral. There’d been an urn sitting on a table, one that was empty, a fact only she knew about. Everyone else had cried over her father’s supposedly cremated remains, while she’d sat, stoically, and wondered on which planet the Tok’ra had buried him. There’d be no cross, no mark for him out there. There’s a cross here, on Earth, though she’s never been there, doesn’t see the point in visiting an empty grave. She’s closer to her father when she’s flying through space than she ever could be on Earth.
It’s amazing to think about how far she’s come. She’s gone too far to measure her life in astronomical units, too far to think about it in purely scientific terms. She’s saved Earth countless times, liberated the galaxy twice. She’s lost friends, and found new ones. She’s happy, flying this ship, despite the fact that her flight suit is green, not orange. The shuttle program was shut down a year ago and yet she’s still out here when, in another life, she might have been Earth-bound with no sure way back to the reaches of space. Content perhaps, but always, always looking up, wondering about the possibilities out there. Now she gets to live those possibilities.
When she’s on Earth, the stars pull at her heartstrings and she’s restless, always looking up the way she used to, itching to get back out there again. She can close her eyes and still see the patterns of the stars; they’re her map, they’ve always, without fail, guided her home. She’s lived among them for so long that she feels untethered when she’s standing on solid ground. She’s settled firmly in the cradle of space, its endlessness wrapped around her shoulders like a blanket. She can’t imagine her life any other way, can’t imagine what it would be like to be on Earth, look up at the night sky and not know what kinds of secrets and memories the universe holds.