Meanwhile, Back in the Solar System....

[sinanju]

Who: Cassandra Sugarbaker
Where: The Lifeboat
When: Wednesday, June 16th
Invited: Chloe Sullivan, Xander Harris, Faith Lehane
Status: Incomplete

Cassandra Sugarbaker looked over the controls one last time. Everything looked right. The lifeboat--they still hadn't named it and Cassandra had begun to think they never would--was in orbit

Comments

This Looks Better....

[sinanju]

As Cassandra stared at the star, fins grew out of the surface of the lifeboat, spreading and branching in fractal patterns that glowed white hot as the lifesystem began dumping excess heat as fast as possible. The howling of the ventilation system abated slightly.

Cassandra began decelerating the lifeboat. She had no idea where they were, or how they'd gotten here. Flashing through the system at this speed was a bad idea until they figured that out.

"Where are we?" Chloe asked, shouting to make herself heard over the roar of the vents. "What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything," Cassandra called back. "I thought you did it."

"Wasn't me," Chloe said.

"Me neither," Xander said. "Faith? No? Not her either," he added. "But, hey--let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. We're alive and no longer in danger of being baked alive."

"Ordinarily I'd agree," Cassandra said. "But since we have no idea how it happened, for all we know we could find ourselves right back where we started. Wouldn't you rather know for sure that won't happen?"

Xander made a face. "When you put it that way, yeah."

"So let's try to find out."

* * *

It took a few hours to work out what had happened. By then the life system was back to normal. The temperature was comfortable, the ventilation all but inaudible. No permanent damage to any of the ship's systems, though the communal stash of chocolate, the refrigerated foodstuffs and some of the frozen items--were ruined.

"It was the dimension shift device," Chloe announced over dinner. She'd been pouring over the cockpit data recordings all afternoon.

Cassandra looked at her, forkful of food in mid-air. "What?" Xander and Faith echoed her question.

Chloe grimaced. "Dimensional shift device is something of a misnomer, apparently," she said. "Remember when Rodney tried to explain it to us? I don't have nearly enough math to follow him, but I do remember that he said it moved in six dimensions of spacetime."

"Oh yeah, sure--of course," Xander said airily.

"Well, we've only ever used three of them, apparently. We changed our position from one dimension to another, and through time, but not our location within a universe. Which is why we always translated into the same relative position--in orbit around earth."

"So...what? I still don't get it," Xander said.

"So when we were stuck inside a red giant, the lifeboat shifted our position in space. It jumped us to a different location--but we're still in the same universe. It didn't have power enough to change that.

"Apparently," Chloe said, "moving us through space doesn't take nearly a much power as changing universes."

"Ami, Jon and Megabyte never told us it could do that," Cassandra said.

"They probably didn't know," Chloe said. "They didn't know a lot more about this vessel than we do."

"So why hasn't this happened before?" Faith asked. "We've jumped around several times--and you guys were doing it for a while before we joined you."

Chloe shrugged. "This a lifeboat--one built by a very advanced people, who had to assume that the passengers might not include trained pilots. So when the ship was in danger of destruction, the computer took action. It moved us to a safer location. Otherwise it doesn't interfere."

"So where did it take us?" Xander asked.

"That's the thing," Chloe said. "As far as I can tell, it jumped us to a system with a stargate. The computer has a list of such places."

"You mean--?"

"Yup," Chloe said. "Odds are there's a habitable planet out there somewhere very close. And very possibly it's inhabited."