Cameron Alphabet Soup! B is for Boondocks
It's Gen Fic Day again over in sg_fignewton's sector of the Empire, and I have not one but TWO fics for it! (Although neither one is a novella. Sorry.)
This is for the letter B in the Cam Alphabet Soup. The second fic will go up later today.
B is for Boondocks
It was Cameron Mitchell’s twenty-third trip through the Gate, so the number wasn’t anything special or different. What was different was the landscape.
Teal’c looked impassive. Carter looked distracted. Jackson looked annoyed. Cam looked around and drew a nice deep breath, full of the smell of green grasses and dusty earth. Under the wide empty sky, rippling waves of grass ran out to the horizon in every direction from the Gate, a lone point of stone and metal in a sea of green and brown and bronze and gold.
Carter pulled out her compass and the widget-o-meter she’d developed for calibrating terrestrial compasses to work with extraterrestrial planetary magnetic fields. Teal’c began to wade through the hip-deep grass, heading unerringly, Cam assumed, for the spot where the UAV had splatted when its instrumentation was knocked out by that same unusually strong planetary magnetic field. Jackson and Cam followed the clear trail of bent and crushed grasses to where the MALP had gotten stuck.
Cam gave a cursory glance at the wheels and couldn’t see any reason for the breakdown. Well, as long as the planet wasn’t hostile, Landry would send out technicians and retrieve the Air Force’s Very Expensive Property. He got a good hold on the flanges, scrambled and clambered on top of the thing and looked around.
Jackson squinted up at him. “See anything?”
“Nope.” Cam pivoted slowly. “Nothing but miles and miles of . . . miles and miles.”
“No trees, huh?” Jackson’s grin had that private, in-joke look to it.
“Trees?”
“That was a joke of Jack’s. I don’t think he ever put it in the reports.” A shrug. “Nothing at all? You’d think there’d have to be something . . . I mean, there’s a Gate, so . . . ”
Cam finished his pirouette and pointed. “Over there. Long way off, but there’s a kind of a shadow. That’s trees. In country like this, where there’s trees, there’s water. And where there’s water, there might be a settlement.”
Jackson brightened, then narrowed his eyes. “How far off?”
“Bit of a walk. Nice day for it, though.”
“Are you always this cheerful?”
“Hell, it could always be worse. Like I like to remind myself,” Cam said as he hopped down off the MALP, “at least I’m not in Kansas any more.”