Waves are Universal - Chapter 6
part three: new world in my view
Colonel Richards finally relents, on March 15th (Jack knows the exact date because the rag-tag school the base has scrambled together puts on a very low-budget version of Julius Caesar that Sam drags him to and chose the date meaningfully) and assigns Jack to the watch rota. Sam and Alle try to hide their excitement as best as possible - he’d taken to sitting in their lab and asking questions whose answers he didn’t understand - but he catches Sam whispering thank God under her breath when he mentions being on “Gate Watch” and he pretends to be insulted.
It’s boring.
He expected it to be boring, but not this boring. After two days, he decides to stuff his pack with office supplies and back issues of Wired and begins building an arsenal of toy weapons. He proudly shows off his pen-and-ruler crossbow to Sam one night but she frowns and takes it away from him. He tries not to sulk when she disappears with it for an hour (he is used to her taking toys out of his hands so he doesn’t hurt himself or blow anything up, but the toys are usually alien devices, not pieces of office warfare). But she comes back with it, having replaced the rubber band with a piece of elastic tubing and exchanged the ruler for a strip of staff weapon-proof Kevlar, and offers it to him with a kiss on his cheek.
“Best girlfriend ever,” he says, after testing it out and discovering that her version shoots the pen cartridge clear across the room, only stopped by the closed door of their quarters.
“Girlfriend, huh?” She quirks an eyebrow, but can’t quite hide the smile.
He shrugs; though calling her his girlfriend when they haven’t even been on an official date seems odd (and he’s way too old to have a girlfriend anyway, not without it sounding like he’s one of those ancient guys who dates twentysomethings), he doesn’t know what else to call her. “Yeah.”
The smile widens. She hasn’t been anyone’s girlfriend since she joined the program. The label sounds ridiculous and perfect all at the same time.
After collecting the pen and crossbow and putting both in his pack for tomorrow, Jack settles next to her on the couch and slides his arm around her shoulder. The moment is oddly domestic and he frowns, feeling like they should probably be watching the nightly news instead of staring at a blank wall. With a little bit of maneuvering, he lies down on his back with Sam resting on his chest. “How was your day?” He asks, gently rubbing her shoulders. They’ll have to move to the bed at some point - they’ve fallen asleep on the couch like this before with disastrous results in the morning - but it’s still early and in lieu of actual nightly news to watch, it seems perfect.
“Oh,” Sam says; in the excitement of the crossbow and discovering that she now has a boyfriend, she’d forgotten about the rather important news she’d intended to share with him the moment he came back from his watch. “We figured it out.”
“Yeah?” His hands gradually trail lower and lower, until his fingers are teasing at the bare skin exposed between her jeans and the hem of her shirt.
She lifts her head and smiles widely at him. “Big space guns.”
***
Captain Andrews squints into the night vision goggles. “What the hell is that?”
Troy takes the goggles out of Andrews’ hands and focuses on the bit of rock the other man had idly been examining for coyotes. He clicks a button on the side a few times before handing the goggles to Jack.
Jack peers through the lenses and notices several unnaturally-shaped lumps sitting where there was definitely nothing a few hours ago. “You guys have a rock breeding problem I don’t know about?”
While booting up a laptop, Troy unhooks his radio from his shoulder. “Alle, this is Gate. Come in please.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Jack points out.
“She’s there.” He taps on the keyboard and images from the goggles appear on the screen. “Alle…”
The familiar sounds of someone careening into a lab to catch the phone filter over the radio. “Sorry! Needed coffee. What’s up?” Papers shuffling, probably to find a space to put the coffee.
“I’m sending you some pictures. Can you take a look?”
“Taking up photography?”
“No.” Troy glares at the radio.
“No need to get defensive, Troy. I think it’s good. You need a hobby. But I have to break it to you - it’s dark out. Maybe you should wait until sunrise.” Her smirk comes across even through the crackling radio.
“Shut up. You’re worse than Kate. Sent.”
“Alright, give me a few.”
“Roger that.”
Not thirty seconds go by before “Oh, shit,” crackles over the radio.
“I know my lighting needs some work, but…”
“Shut up. I’m coming out there.”
Jack blinks because suddenly Alle is standing right next to him and he could’ve sworn it was a thirty-minute hike to the gate from the base. “Hi.” He tilts his head in confusion.
“Venkati personal transporter,” she explains.
“Cool.” He hands the goggles to her. She plays with the focus and Jack watches as the color drains from her face, turning her cheeks bright white in the silver moonlight.
“Stay upright, Al,” Troy advises and places a steadying hand on her elbow.
“Five foot soldiers guarding three raiders. Raiders fit six; they wouldn’t send three just for five guys to stand around; there are least eight more somewhere, probably a scouting party.” Her voice grows steadier as she talks.
Jack wonders how they all could’ve missed the soldiers, but doesn’t voice his concern; it took them hours to even notice the raiders. “I guess they missed their ship.”
Alle looks sideways at Jack, silently telling him to be quiet, and squints back through the binocular lenses. “Wait. Two scouts on the ridges at three and eleven o’clock.” She turns around and scans the landscape behind them. Finding nothing threatening, she turns back to the raiders in the distance. She zooms in. “They’re not shifting.”
“What’s that mean?”
She sighs and hands the goggles to Jack. “It means that they explicitly came here. To this point in time, space and reality.”
“Which means...?” Andrews waves his hands, searching for more explanation.
Troy thumps Andrews on the back of his head. “It means get your ass up because we have a really big problem.”
Alle runs her hands over her face. “I need two people to stay here and keep an eye on our friends. Andrews, you and Connor stick around. Radio me if anything changes. And we’ll talk about what the hell the four of you were really doing when you should’ve been paying attention later.” She punches a combination into the band on her left arm.
“Can we hitch a ride?” Troy asks.
“No. I’m gonna wake some people up. Try not to miss anything important on your hike back.” And with that, she disappears.
Jack feels vaguely like a five year-old scolded for spilling milk. “Oops.” He slings his P-90 over his shoulder and falls in step with Troy.
Troy shrugs; he’s heard worse from her, though usually after touching something he shouldn’t. “I think she was planning on sleeping tonight,” he says, by way of explanation.
Jack isn’t sure that sleeping really jives with needing coffee, but he’s long accepted that Sam’s understanding of proper sleep patterns when working under deadline doesn’t match with his and Alle certainly didn’t inherit her world-saving skills from her father.
***
Jack nearly runs into Zach when the younger man stops suddenly in the doorway of the briefing room. He casts a confused look in Zach’s direction and sidesteps him, taking a seat at the table.
“What meal are you eating right now?” Zach sits next to his fiancée.
“Lunch,” she says, and digs into her salad.
“It’s midnight.”
Alle looks at him sideways, fork halfway to her mouth, with a glare Jack knows very well from Daniel, Sam and Teal’c. It’s an expression that says yeah, and? “I’m hungry and we have a lot of spinach.”
Zach sighs and leans back in his chair. “I give up.”
“You’re the one who asked me to marry you.” She spears a tomato.
With the amount of eye rolling that goes on by the others in the room, Jack suspects that this is an exchange that happens often.
Sam slides into the chair next to Jack, setting her own salad in front of her. “Oh, I didn’t know there were cranberries,” she says, peering forlornly into Alle’s bowl.
“Want some?” At Sam’s nod, Alle slides her bowl over. She smiles when Sam slides it back with a thank you.
Jack doesn’t bother voicing his confusion about the situation. He’s fairly certain that his alternate self went gray a lot faster than he did and it was entirely the fault of these two women.
General McLaggen rushes into the room and Jack thinks that the man looks pretty good for being roused out of bed not thirty minutes earlier and debriefed - according to a conversation Jack overheard in the hallway - in his pajamas. If Jack were in McLaggen’s position, he’d probably wander in with his hair sticking up at odd angles and his shirt buttoned unevenly. And his shoes on the wrong feet, if he even remembered shoes.
“Start from the beginning,” McLaggen orders. He listens intently, occasionally jotting down notes, as Jack and Troy describe what they saw and radio Andrews back at the gate for a thankfully uneventful update. He nods solemnly and turns toward Alle. “What do you have for us?”
Jack watches as Alle looks up from her notepad, salad finished, and pushes her hair out of her face. She doesn’t bother to mask the exhaustion in her eyes and he thinks there might be fear lurking there, too.
“Best case scenario - our weapon works and locks them into phase with us and we start shooting and blow them off the face of the planet. Worst case scenario - our weapon doesn’t work, they shift, go home and come back in a week with a lot of friends and destroy us.”
“You mean you don’t know if this thing works yet?” McLaggen raises his eyebrows.
Sam opens her mouth to defend science and the method of scientific inquiry and say that they’re reasonably certain the weapon will work and that, in this scenario, reasonably certain is about as good as they could expect. Alle pointedly clears her throat and purses her lips, raising an eyebrow defiantly in McLaggen’s direction and Sam chooses to stay silent on the matter, feeling that this is a longstanding argument she’d best stay out of.
“No, General, we haven’t had a chance to test it. We didn’t want to turn on the phase shifter from the warship on the chance that it would a) disappear or b) send a signal back to the hive.”
“And what if we reset with your instructions, it turned out that the weapon didn’t work, and then the Rak’har came again anyway?”
“First off,” Alle straightens in her chair, now visibly annoyed, “there’s really no way to tell whether this is the first time we’ve encountered them. Anyone who’d traded with the Hakaan in the past ten years and picked up a temporal control relay could’ve modified it for widespread effect and reset everything in hope of a different outcome. And secondly, if that’s the defeatist attitude you really want to take, General, at least next time around we would all have a good starting point instead of spending several years getting yelled at by you people for not working fast enough.”
“Point taken,” McLaggen says, and backs down. “Harper, you got a strategy for me?”
Troy stands up and hits the dimmer on the lights. “Absolutely, sir.” He turns on a projection screen and calls up the strategy files.
***
“What do they look like?” Sam asks, nestling her head in the crook of Jack’s shoulder. Throughout all of Alle’s memories, the Rak’har never appeared as much more than hulking shadows. Either she had never gotten a good look at them or, more likely, she’d buried the images so deep that not even the Tok’ra devices could pull them out.
Jack sighs quietly and brings his hand up to brush a lock of hair off of Sam’s cheek. His hand wanders, traveling across her shoulder and down her arm before finally resting on her lower back. He searches his mind for the right words to describe what he saw in the starlight, but all he comes up with is: “Kind of like an Unas mated with a Super Soldier.”
Sam makes a face. “Ew.” The Unas have always unsettled her, even after Daniel explained that they were gentle and kind and not as monstrous as they looked, and Anubis’ Super Soldiers still scare her, even years and several realities away from where they’re a problem. She considers asking Alle for a way to defeat them, but tables the idea for now: one untouchable enemy at a time. The part of her that’s still tangentially concerned with preserving her own timeline tables the subject for good; they’re going home with a way to protect themselves from the Rak’har, which they shouldn’t even encounter for thirty or so years, there’s no need to damage the timeline even further.
“Stop thinking,” Jack says and gently presses on her back with the palm of his hand.
Sam smiles. “I’m trying.”
Jack nods, his cheek rubbing against her hair. There are things that need to be done - that are being done - before the mission can be cleared to go as soon as the sun rises. But those things are being attended to by other people, people who have worked together for years and who have fallen right back into old patterns of working silently side-by-side and whose routines and processes would be knocked out of place by the presence of himself or Sam. They’re involved, of course, because Sam’s the only one besides Alle who knows how to work the space guns (and Alle’s going to be in the air) and Jack took extreme exception to being left out of the plan so he’s been assigned to stand somewhere with a gun, but it just seems wrong to be lying in bed the few hours before a mission.
“Now you’re thinking.”
“Odd, I know.”
Sam snorts. “You’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for.”
He lets that comment go - she’s way, way smarter than he could ever imagine, even if he is playing dumb a lot of the time - and tugs the blanket up from her waist to cover her back. It’s officially been spring for two weeks, but there’s a cool breeze tonight blowing through their open windows. Sam sighs contently and Jack feels her eyelashes brush against his shoulder as she closes her eyes. This is the calmest he’s ever seen her the night before a mission but this is also the first time he’s ever known her to sleep the night before a mission.
Careful not to disturb her too much - her breath has already evened out into the telltale pattern of sleep - he reaches over and clicks off the light, encasing the room in darkness until his eyes adjust to the ambient light filtering in from the lights and stars outside. He kisses her temple and murmurs sweet dreams even though this is only really a nap instead of a full night’s sleep.
***
“Remind me again why there’s no Wagner?”
“McLaggen nixed it.”
“Screw that. Anyone got it with them?”
“Feeling a little ‘I love the smell of dead Rak’har in the morning,’ Playboy?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Sorry, guys, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ is in my other cockpit.”
“Shut your mouth, Hardball.”
“Keep your pants on, everyone; I’m working on it.”
“Einstein to the rescue.”
“As always.”
“What would you losers do without me?”
“Fly in silence, I guess.”
“Actually, I think we’d all be dead.”
“Aw, Krypton. Protecting your girl’s honor?”
“I can protect my own honor, Gladiator. Shut the hell up or you get no Wagner.”
“Well if you’re going to hold German opera over my head…”
“Just think, guys. When I was seven, I wanted to be a professional ballerina.”
“Beginning to regret not following that career path?”
“Little bit.”
“I think that’s enough chatter, folks.”
Sam stifles a chuckle when General McLaggen’s stern command elicits a chorus of yes sirs. She adjusts the earpiece of her radio and checks the balance of the gun in her hands. She fiddles with it, settling the Rak’har disruptor more securely on the body of the gun. It’s held on by duct tape.
“That thing needs a better name,” Jack says and motions to her gun with his.
Sam shrugs and rubs at her eye, forcing a grain of sand back out where it belongs. She tunes out last minute flight instructions to the X-314 pilots - idly hoping that the high number is due to changes in seat design instead of fatal malfunctions - and settles in against the rock she’s decided is hers. They’ve called the weapon any number of unwieldy names - anti-Rak’har shifting weapons, phase-solidifying field generator - but none of them seem to stick beyond five minutes. “Like what?” She asks, finally content that the sand is out of her eye. “Vera?”
Jack gets the feeling that he’s missing a geek joke but doesn’t press the issue. “Sure.”
McLaggen runs through the plan one more time, just in case everyone managed to forget in the last few hours. Three X-314s will fly over the Rak’har camp, partly as a distraction and partly to make sure that they haven’t done anything overnight that would screw up the plan. Zach, also in an X-314, will zoom in while the Rak’har are sufficiently distracted and Alle fires the weapon at them (there was a bit of argument when Troy mentioned that they’d be together, but Alle pointed out that they doubled up all the time before McLaggen decided to split SG-1 upon discovery that Alle and Zach were dating and besides, she said, there was no way she was getting in a plane piloted by anybody else); if it’s successful, they radio back to everyone else to start shooting and then it becomes a fairly standard offensive mission. Sam will hang out on the side with another weapon just in case it turns out that the effects wear off after a bit, and hopefully they’re all done in time for lunch.
If it’s not successful, they’re really screwed.
Sam laughs as the opening notes to “Ride of the Valkyries” starts playing over the radio. “Showtime.”
Jack ducks as the X-314s fly over his head, the roar of their engines almost deafening in the silence that had previously settled over the desert. He’d forgotten how loud battle could be, and they haven’t even started shooting yet. Someone has the good sense to turn the Wagner down a few notches so they can hear radio communication.
“…more. Repeat, three extra bogies on the ground; total of six. Count twenty-eight, that is two-eight, uglies. Rock ‘n roll, Krypton.”
Jack makes a face at the news that more have appeared in the scant hour that they had nobody keeping watch, but Sam simply shrugs. It doesn’t matter how many Rak’har are out there: the weapon will affect all of them or not at all.
“Roger that, Playboy. Package is on its way.”
Ready for it this time, Jack merely looks up and offers a casual salute to Zach as he expertly pilots the plane into position. It hovers motionlessly above the desert, the air shimmering in the wake of the engines. “Any time now,” Jack mutters to himself and ignores the rock kicked in his direction by Sam at his impatience.
The plane jerks in the air and a smoky blue beam of light shoots out of the weapon mounted on its belly. There’s a horrific screeching noise that reminds Jack of nails on a chalkboard and then, silence.
Sam grimaces: they hadn’t tested it, but they certainly weren’t expecting that to be the end result of pulling the trigger. She mentally runs through the diagnostics Alle is running in the air. It should only take a few seconds, but Sam begins to wonder whether there’s a time dilation side effect they didn’t account for.
“Ladies and gentlemen, go forth and kill the bad guys. We have a go.” Alle’s grin is audible over the radio and within seconds, Jimi Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower” replace Richard Wagner.
The excitement at successfully knocking out the Rak’har’s main defenses is short-lived, however; in the seven seconds it took Alle to make sure it worked, the Rak’har also discovered that it worked and had spent the time wisely, arming themselves.
Jack personally thinks that the flaming bullets are a bit overkill.
Somewhere amidst the cheering on the radio, the guitar and the cacophony of bullets beginning to fly, he’s sure is an order from General McLaggen to please start firing. It’s more out of habit and for formality’s sake than anyone needing to be told to shoot; if Jack’s gone a little crazy not shooting anything for ten months, he can’t imagine what these guys are feeling having gone nearly six years without firing a single shot. As he ducks out from behind the rock to fire a few rounds, he vaguely registers Sam shifting the Rak’har gun around her back and picking up her actual weapon.
Rocks and sand explode around them as bullets and mortars rush into the ground, missing their targets. Jack thinks he hits a few, but even stuck in this reality the Rak’har are proving to be very difficult to kill. Sam lets out a cry and he tears his gaze away from the dusty battlefield in front of him to check on her.
He inhales sharply, seeing red blossom against the tan of her shirt. “You okay?” He shouts.
Sam grits her teeth and nods. “Just grazed my arm.” Now she’s pissed. She was pissed before, but now she’s really angry because she liked that shirt and she was two weeks shy of hitting a record number of months without being shot (that there wasn’t anyone around to shoot her didn’t seem to matter). She rips out the pin on a grenade and throws it toward the Rak’har and follows it up with a long burst of gunfire, ignoring the pain in her arm.
Jack watches her for a few seconds, just to make sure she really is okay, but finds himself mesmerized by the way she moves. He’s watched her shoot a gun before, but her aiming and firing combined with moving out of the way and narrating what she sees into the radio is almost elegant. He tells his stirring erection that he’ll jump her later, when she isn’t bleeding and they aren’t being shot at and there isn’t a better than even chance that one of them will end up with sand some place unfortunate, and rejoins the fight.
***
Jack pushes his way through the crowded infirmary to find Sam. He’d been sidetracked by Troy and Zach after the battle, both men wanting his ground report immediately so they could scramble something together to appease McLaggen and give them enough time to write up a proper debrief; Sam had been whisked away to the infirmary by someone who’d noticed the blood on her arm. He knows that it isn’t serious, and knows that she’s survived longer with far worse, but that doesn’t stop his worrying. He scans the room and finally spies Sam’s blonde hair near the back.
“…longer than we thought it would. Maybe we can increase the naquadah concentration and speed up its release.”
“Then we run the risk of it overloading if the trigger’s held for too long.”
“Okay,” Kate says. “Will you two stop geeking out for five seconds so I can bandage you up?”
Sam and Alle silence immediately, both looking sufficiently chastised. Kate smiles thankfully and starts to clean Sam’s arm.
“How’d your head get…?” Sam gestures to her forehead with her uninjured hand.
Alle frowns from the stool next to Sam’s bed. “The weapon made the whole plane kick. I hit my head on Zach’s seat.”
“I thought those were padded,” Jack says, hopping onto the bed next to Sam, making sure he’s very much out of Kate’s way.
“The headrest is. But I’m shorter than the average pilot.”
“You should’ve been wearing a helmet,” Kate grumbles. She begins rolling gauze around the now-clean wound.
Alle drops the argument with a glare at Kate’s head and then turns her attention to Jack. “Everyone okay? I haven’t heard any casualty reports.”
He gives her a thumbs up. “Because there aren’t any.”
***
Jack makes a mental note to have sex with post-successful-mission Sam more frequently.
He’d watched as she’d palmed the pain meds Kate had given her in the infirmary, slipping the pills into her pants pocket as soon as Kate’s back was turned. He hadn’t understood it at the time - bullet wounds hurt like a bitch whether the bullet hits you or just slices across your skin - but had stayed silent on the matter until they were safely outside, walking back to their quarters after lunch. He received a mischievous smile in response to his question and had found himself pushed up against the door the second they were inside, her lips firmly pressing against his.
“They make me tired,” she’d explained later, sliding out of bed to find her pants where they’d been cast off in the living room. Returning with a glass of water, she’d swallowed the meds before crawling back into bed and curling into his chest.
Jack hopes that the image of her walking towards him, backlit by the setting sun filtering through the curtains, completely naked and grinning, stays with him for a very long time.
She sighs and he briefly loosens his arms to allow her to shift in her sleep. He drops a kiss on her shoulder and closes his eyes. He listens to the revelry outside - and thinks he hears Alle mention big damn heroes, which he thinks he needs to use as soon as possible - but Sam’s even breaths draw his thoughts back inside and to their bed. He drifts off to sleep and, for the first time in months, doesn’t think of home.
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