“Stargate SG-1: 2003, Chapter 2"
By Chris O’Farrell
This is a work of fan fiction. Stargate-SG1 and all associated characters remain the property of MGM. Legal crap blah, blah, blah.
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-BC303 ‘Prometheus’. Docked. Groom Lake AFB, Earth. March 1, 2003. 22:00 Zulu.
If there was a constant in the universe that Samantha Carter had found, it was not physics. Neither friend nor foe, it merely was and served no one. It was not time, the chaos with the black hole five years ago had caused her more headaches then she cared to admit. And it was most certainly not her life…that had become more infinity complex over the last few years then she could comprehend.
No, if there was a constant, it was truly that bad news never came in small doses, but in enormous chunks crashing one right after the other. Major Samantha Carter rubbed her eyes to ease the burning fatigue she felt as she leaned back from her console in Prometheus’s Combat Information Centre. Buried deep inside the warships hull, it could serve as a secondary command centre in the event that the bridge was compromised, but was mostly used to run the ships sophisticated sensor and communications equipment and let the bridge ‘fight’ the ship without distraction.
Of course, while Prometheus was parked in her below ground hanger at Area-51, the room was empty, giving her a perfect place to work without distraction. Their jet hadn’t even touched down at Area-51 before she got to work looking over what little data they had. No wormhole connection could be made from Earth to any remote Stargate. She dismissed the idea that their Stargate was non functional as remote, especially as all the diagnostics came back in the green. So she started looking for external problems.
On the Western edge of Area-51 was a cluster of completely innocent looking satellite dishes. A cursory examination would reveal them to be the omnipresent high gain Satellite uplinks on any US military base, linking them to the AF-SATCOM communications network. A closer look however would show the dish was aimed at a much higher orbit then those constellations of US military satellites used. Yet if anyone had then bothered to take their curiosity further, their investigations would have exposed nothing more threatening then a perfectly normal GPS node on the receiving end of the up and downlink.
Of course it was all simply a lie. This satellite could not care less about anything on the ground of the planet it circled, rather, its attention was focused out into the solar system. Packed inside the small space were the liberated guts from an Al’Kesh’s sensor array, courtesy of the same bomber that had provided the X303’s temporary Hyperdrive core. While not as powerful as the sensor systems on Prometheus herself, it did let her study the areas around the solar system with technology hundreds of years beyond anything Earth could boast.
A green light flashed as the download finished from the sensor logs in orbit and data windows started to pop up all over her screen. Using the trackball built into the station, she killed the more mundane EM reading reports, bringing up and enlarging the subspace data stream…. which was pegged off the chart. For five seconds, she simply stared at the screen, trying to digest the mass of data that was stubbornly refusing to change. The passive subspace receivers had been almost overloaded with background noise at an even rate for the last fifteen hours. The directional array was a screen of solid red. Which was unprecedented. She had only ever seen that scope with a slight blue scattering of background noise. Red meant subspace noise was at the saturation limit of the sensors. The active scans were also confusing to say the least and she gave up trying to make sense of the raw data. With a keystroke she got the computer working to crunch down a 3D model of the readings. The process bar gave an estimated time of 5 minutes and she gave silent thanks to the Goa’uld enhanced computer systems built into the 303’s mainframe. She doubted that even Earths most powerful supercomputers could match the processing power Prometheus packed.
“Well well if it isn’t the world famous Samantha Carter. Word on the street…or ships…is that you desperately need some help from a competent scientist right now!”
Correction Carter thought to herself as she closed her eyes and sighed. There were TWO constants. Bad news AND Rodney McKay.
Pushing off the floor, she turned to face the brilliant and unbelievably irritating astrophysicist leaning against the bulkhead by the door. His white lab coat was bulging with a dozen pieces of equipment from PDA’s to a screwdriver set and a standard issue McKay smirk.
“Don’t you ever knock? Or is it just that you prefer to irritate people by barging in randomly?”
“Yes, see my entire purpose in life is irritating people on secret Government battle cruisers that don’t officially exist, its part of my whole world domination plan!”
Seeing that she wasn’t laughing he sighed and started to walk over to her.
“I’m sorry Major. I promise to make copious amounts of noise the next time I enter a room with you in it. And speaking of making noise, I hear you’ve picked up loud racket in subspace”. McKay paused considering. “You know that’s kind of funny, making noise, racket in subspace…” he enjoyed his joke for a few seconds before turning back… “where was I?”
With a patience cultivated of years of leading Colonel O’Neill through scientific concepts beyond most Earth physicists, Sam forced a plastic smile on her face. “Subspace sensor readings. And don’t you have a reactor to get online? ”
“Actually no, that, what’s his name, Jones…?”
“Jonas” Sam supplied.
“Whoever” McKay shrugged, “He figured out the problem. The only Naquadriah left by Anubis was impure, it had tiny little veins of regular Naquadah running through it that was throwing the electrical current all over the place”. Sam brought a mock look of realisation onto her face.
“Oh so YOU weren’t able to get the reactor working? That’s surprising, all those Naquadah reactors you built for Russia didn’t help? So where is that competent scientist anyway?”
“Ahhh the inevitable comeback. I’d give you a ten for effort, only a three for Funny though. Anyway, fun as this is, you figured out how you guys broke the Stargate yet?”
She let the barb slide. Fencing with McKay was actually enjoyable in an irritating way, but she didn’t have the time.
“If by that you mean have I figured out what is interfering, I think so” she allowed as she turned back to the computers, McKay strolling up next to her to squint at the screen.
“Oh wow,” he muttered as his eyes traced over the maxed out sensor readings. “That is impressive isn’t it?”
“I know. But something about it doesn’t feel right”
“Something about a totally unknown phenomenon to humankind doesn’t feel right?”
“Funny” she said in a deadpan voice as she highlighted the wave signature. “It’s this whole subspace blockage. Something generating this level of power couldn’t possibly operate under a cloaking device. And it would have to be in realspace to generate the power, so-“
“-so, where is it?” McKay finished her line of thought. “Of course we wouldn’t necessarily see it, we have more then enough planets or moons for it to be hiding behind”.
“Lets see if we can narrow its location down” Carter replied as the computer finally finished the data crunching.
The readout came up showing a large red sphere.
“Well that’s anticlimactic” McKay snorted.
“No kidding” Sam frowned. Then she happened to glance at the scale in the corner of the screen.
“Uh, this can’t be right” she muttered.
“No, its impossible” McKay agreed, though his tone hinted anything but agreement.
Sam flicked the trackball on the console to zoom in through the orange sphere. Inside was a scale model of the solar system. The sphere, centred on the Sun extended out beyond Pluto in radius.
“Well I think we’ve found what’s blocking the Stargates connections,” McKay muttered as looked on in something like awe.
The Goa’uld ‘Death Glider’ banked hard in towards Captain Richard “Zombie” Harris’s F-302 Interceptor and in theory, he was dead. There was no move any terrestrial aircraft could possibly make to shake the nightmarishly manoeuvrable alien fighter. Even an FA-22 with its enhanced thrust vectoring abilities would not be able to clear the ‘lethal’ cone in the approximately one point two seconds the enemy fighter would take to acquire and shoot as sped past on the happy side of mach three. Mounting two powerful Staff Cannons under its broad curved wings, the next thing he should feal would be the impact of plasma bolts, followed either the auto ejection system firing…or his shattered craft spinning out of the sky.
Of course…the F-302 could hardly be described as a terrestrial aircraft.
In a blur of motion, Harris snap rolled his craft into a hard starboard turn as he jammed his foot onto the rudder peddles, simultaneously, popping the speadbreaks and cutting the throttle to idle. Rolling hard to port, his craft all but stopped in midair, shedding its momentum as it sidestepped out of the Death Gliders line of fire. Rolling back out Harris brought his nose and the powerful 20mm cannon it housed within right to where the enemy fighter should have been as it streaked past. Easy kill.
It wasn’t there.
Swearing softly, he risked a split second glance a multi function display. The Glider was still locked up by his fire control systems but it had faked him out. Pulling into a near impossible ninety-degree course shift, it had broken off just as Richard started his evasive manoeuvre, accelerating away at maximum power while he shuddered to a halt. A smirk worked its way across his face. He had to hand it to the driver of that ship, they knew exactly what they were doing with it and they had read him like a book then skipped ahead to the appropriate countermove in the next chapter.
Not that he had any intention of letting it go at that.
Hauling back on his stick, he spun around into a head to head run as the Glider barrelled down ‘the ramp’ towards him, the most lethal manoeuvre in air combat. It was also a tactic that favoured the F-302 over the Death Glider, which instantly made him wonder why the Glider was obliging him so kindly. Selecting his cannon, the HUD generated a floating piper that moved as the 302 did, a ‘tail’ behind it showing the projected firing line that he moved over the green box highlighting the enemy attack craft.
Or at least he TIRED to.
Dancing around his HUD, the enemy fighter jinked randomly with the manoeuvrability only a Glider could command, sidestepping as Harris tried to get a clean shot. In sudden realisation, he realised what was going on. With its closure rate and manoeuvring abilities, a Glider could sidestep at the last second and burn him from the sky at point blank range and the way it was moving would deny him any chance of taking it out before point blank.
Well screw this he thought, stabbing a second trigger on the flight stick.
With a deep roar, an AIM-9Y Sidewinder missile leapt off his port wing pylon, accelerating rapidly on an intercept course for the incoming Glider. The latest iteration of the venerable US missile, this version was specially designed for the 302 mating the successful AIM-9X design with a hybrid IR/UV sensor package, laser proximity fuse and Naquadah enhanced warhead. Not very powerful as far as such weapons went, it still boosted the yield an order of magnitude greater then a high explosive anti tank missile without a loss in manoeuvrability.
It would take approximately four point six seconds for the Sidewinder to cross the distance between the two craft. In theory (and in space), the Glider with its far superior acceleration and manoeuvrability would be able to turn and pull away, outdistancing the missile before it could close to lethal range. But here physics intervened. The pilot of the Glider reacted like any pilot would, snap ruddering hard to get perpendicular to the missiles flight path, simultaneously pushing the ships power plant to give all it could give. In the vacuum of space it would have been the textbook move to neatly dodge the inbound warhead. But inside an atmosphere, the Gliders thick and gently curved wings were hardly aerodynamic and the sudden maximum power slew into the turn caused the vessel to jump and rotate, so for a fraction of a second it was falling towards Harris and presenting maximum surface area…and it ran right into the hail of 20mm depleted uranium shells from his cannon.
The massive slugs were a wild ‘spray and pray’ shot, based on a fifty / fifty guess as to which way the target would break, but part of the salvo stuck home and blew the Gliders Starboard wing into a shredded mess, shutting down the initial drive and presenting a delicious, impossible to miss target for the Sidewinder, which arrived an eye blink later and converted the Goa’uld attack craft into a cloud of loosely coherent vapour.
“Doh!” came the disembodied voice of his opponent through his flight headset
Allowing his grin to spread to full size, he keyed his own transmit switch as the ‘cockpit’ windows went dark.
“Its all good Jack” Richard chuckled. “You hardly get any stick time running around in the mud with the kiddies.”
With a hiss, the simulator popped and slid back to revile the brightly lit interior of Groom Lake’s flight simulator complex. Two-dozen cockpit sized modules were recessed into the floors down the long room, twelve per side allowing two fighter units to face off literally and figuratively in the most advanced training simulator in the world. Half were replicas of the cockpit of an F-302, Earths first Space capable Interceptor, half that of a Goa’uld Death Glider, the standard, nimble and lethal attack craft used by the Goa’uld. Dozens of pilots were clustered around the master control station that ran the virtual cockpits and linked them together, the large plasma TV wall showing cockpit views as well as sensor readouts to the spectators. As he climbed out of his fake ejection seat, Harris could not help but notice there were two groupings of people milling around. A few of the pilots looked smug and expectant. The rest wore resigned and confused expressions, leading the Captain to believe more then a few bets had been quietly placed on the outcome on the mock dogfight. This didn’t annoy him so much…as the fact that most of the pilots had clearly bet against him.
His grin turned ferrel as he walked over to the only other open cockpit hatch. “For an Air Force puke, you can throw that thing around pretty damn well Jack”
“Well…. you know…” O’Neill replied as he worked out a kink in his back. Glider cockpits were not designed with creature comforts in mind and the simulators ruthlessly duplicated the design to the last detail. “That was a beautiful move, the fake out with the winder, but how the heck did you know which way I would turn?”
“Had a fifty / fifty chance. You wouldn’t climb back up, you’d have a Slammer on your ass before you could burn away. Diving would just give me a clear shot. So you broke port to force the missile to turn just that little more”. Harris shrugged. “And if I had guessed wrong, you would have gotten into the lethal cone and blown me away easily. Of course not one of these ‘pilots’ over here” he said gesturing to the cluster of officers “could make even ONE correct countermove, let alone the three you made”.
Jack noticed not one of the elite pilots or their weapons officers tried to protest that point. Not that he was that surprised. All of the men the USAF had selected for the F-302 program were highly skilled veterans from the Gulf War generation. They had gotten kills lobbing precision guided munitions at long range against ancient aircraft, piloted by opponents without a tenth the training of the typical USAF aviator. The last time a USAF pilot had been forced into a real dogfight had been in Vietnam. Not that it was a GOOD thing to get into an aerial knife fight…but the a Death Glider engagement was more likely then not going to end up as one.
And so enter Captain Richard Harris. Chief instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School based at Navel Air Station Fallon, more commonly known as the ‘Top Gun’ fighter school. He had taken pleasure in beating up on every single pilot in the 302 program with the Death Glider simulator; Jack however had been someone else. Unlike the baby faced flyboys standing around, he was an old school fighter pilot who knew how to get into a scrap and fight his way out. Harris wasn’t at all sure that if the situation had been reversed and Jack had been in the 302 that he would have ‘lived’ through the battle. He clearly had the abilities to lead the second squadron, which just left one last question. But first to send the kids on their way…
“People, you’ve got five minutes to get your kits stowed on Prometheus. Mission briefing in twenty minutes. Dismissed!”
The assembled officers snapped to attention, saluted, and then bolted out the door. Harris turned to O’Neill after he was sure they had left. With a five-minute timeframe, none of them would hang around to eavesdrop. “Colonel, I appreciate you turning up to help us out here. God knows the second unit need a CO if they are going to fight their way through this. But I need to know that you are going to work with me, not against me. I lead the wing. I give the orders upstairs.” Harris kept his voice friendly enough, but both men knew the question was dead serious. ‘Dual’ command had a way of becoming ‘Duel’ command all too quickly with short-term transfers. The Colonel was actually the only Combat Certified officer in both Death Gliders and the F-302 and he was most welcome…assuming he played by the rules.
Thankfully, Jack just held his hands up in mock surrender.
“Hey! I’m just here to help. I don’t want your unit, I like blowing up things on the ground…I don’t mind the change of blowing things up in space though, but I’ll follow you’re lead.”
Harris couldn’t help but smile. The US military had a proud history of inter service rivalry. The US Navy was in fact was somewhat miffed at being left out of the whole Stargate program. The Air Force ran the show, though the Marines and Army had strong involvement. With the exception of a few incidental incidents (generally involving alien ships crash landing in Earths Oceans) however, the USN was ignored. Jack O’Neill probably had no idea just what a shitstorm at the office of the Joint Chiefs he had created when he suggested the then unnamed X-303 be named ‘Enterprise’. While it was undoubtedly clear he had been referring to the intrepid ship of the United Federation of Planets, the idea that the USAF was going to hijack the proudest name in the United States Navy for their own ship (which the Navy had been fighting tooth and nail for command over as well) …it was perhaps better that he didn’t know. But for now, they both knew where everyone stood and the odds of them making it through the next 48 hours had moved up slightly.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll find we have lots of things to blow up today. Come on, we mustn’t keep the children waiting”.
Jonas Quin was in midair.
This was not as one might think, due to an issue with the ships artificial gravity subsystems. Docked at Area-51 in a 1G-gravity well, Prometheus’s gravity plating was completely powered down.
In fact he was suspended in a safety harness above the ships Naquadriah reactor. It was not the most convenient way to work on the very delicate piece of equipment, but it was the best way they had. As the superconducting coils around the core were far too fragile to walk across…and each one cost enough to support a typical American family for two years at least, they had to compromise to get into position.
In between his aerial aerobatics, Jonas was making very slight adjustments to the trinium casing that covered the Naquadriah core, compensating for the interference generated by tiny veins of Naquadah that had been discovered threaded inside the perfect sphere. It was amazing the technology sitting in the bowels of the ship. It was so far beyond anything Kelowna (not check that, Langara he thought to himself) could produce; yet it was hauntingly familiar to the Naquadriah project he had worked on back home. Of course that program had not exactly been concerned about a stable core…the exact opposite in fact when you got down to it, but those days were well behind them. The last of the Naquadriah from the mines had been shipped to Earth in exchange for long term US involvement with helping to bring Langaran technology upto Earth levels. Jonas himself had been offered rather impressive money to come back to the academic circuit and diffuse the considerable knowledge he had picked up in science, culture, the Goa’uld…but politics is where he ended up for now.
In fact his trip to Earth had BEEN political, working out the timetable for the construction of a new teaching hospital on Kelowna. What would look like a rather straightforward proposition to most people?
Except the Andarrie representative wanted a separate hospital in their capital city from the US proposed one, conveniently close to the Stargate for logistics. The Terranian representative thought that was a stupid idea, but thought that their proposal for a Hospital in THEIR capital city was only logical as they clearly had the best academics on the planet. Which then set off into a five hour argument on everything from Kelownan possession of the Stargate to exact numbers and scheduling (to the nearest hour) various nations would have in terms of access to the hospital.
All of which meant it was with great relief he had been able to run like hell away from the negotiations for a while, off to save Earth again. The various diplomats from Langara had been dispersed to safe houses around the planet with the Stargate not working and from what he heard, the three diplomats had miraculously found a common interest in baseball and as long as they had cable, they were perfectly content to take a vacation.
Forcing his mind back to the here and now, Jonas flipped around on the harness and steadied himself on the cores casing. Beside him, Captain Larian Murphy also was suspended in a sling and with a casual precision used specifically crafted tools to manoeuvre the trinium shielding into the right locations as Jonas then zapped it with an arc welder to hold it in place. So far they had painstakingly secured two of the three points needed and he just had to angle in the long tube for the final adjustment…and…there! A short and careful stuttering flame locked the final shield back in place. Safing and powering down the arc welder, he turned to the crowd of engineers at the large engine room window overlooking the ‘pit’ and vigorously gestured ‘up’. Quickly, the winch engaged and lifted them to the small rooftop inspection hatch where they were helped back out. Under him, he heard the core start to hiss as liquid nitrogen started to flow through the pipes as the core restart sequence engaged. Easing town the tight grey service tube, he returned to the engine room and accepted the handshake of Dr Murphy as they happily watched the diagnostics finally lighting up green. One of the engineers looked up from a wall-mounted phone and waved to get his attention.
“Jonas? Major Carter needs you in the CIC. She says she’s its important”.
“Ok. Tell her I’ll be right up. And tell Major Gant that we’ll be ready for flight in half an hour, assuming the pre-flight is good”.
“Yes sir, I’ll pass it-“ the Engineer suddenly broke off as she hiccuped several times, waving to him that she understood as he walked out of the engine room.
Poor girl he thought, what was her name again? Novak? Hope it passed quickly. Entering the lift, he couldn’t help but feal the subtle vibration of the ships primary systems coming online as Prometheus prepared to lift. Time was running out.
) or a Vejur energy field clone?
