Sam was sitting on a hilltop overlooking the Stargate. She'd sat in this same spot and watched the red sun set every day for three years. There was a moment just before the sun passed below the distant mountains that the gate seemed to come alive, surrounded by a shimmering red and gold light. It always reminded her of paintings from long dead artists depicting angels and saints rising up to heaven, their heads framed by golden halos.
When the sun disappeared and darkness settled over the land, Sam lay back and stared up at the stars. They were not her stars. The constellations were different, the density so thick she knew she must be somewhere near the core of whatever galaxy this was. The only certainty she had was that this was not the Milky Way.
Something had gone wrong. She remembered dialing home. She remembered the blast from the Mother Ship hitting the gate just as she stepped through the wormhole, and she remembered an endless wait, drifting, frozen between two points with no way out, until suddenly she felt her body coalesce and a cold stone floor rushed up to meet her face. When she woke, it was morning, and a red sun was rising over an alien world. She'd visited hundreds of planets over her many years with the SGC, and each one had some similarity to her own Earth - the plants, the animals, or maybe just the smell and feel. But this world was different. There was water, and there was dust, sand, and earth, but the plant life was strange - like something out of a wild and crazy science fiction movie, all angles and straight lines, huge, towering tree like plants that rose up for miles into the sky, with leaves as big as houses.
And the animal life was even crazier. Furry balls of flesh with great wings sailed through the air, and centipede like creatures as long as trains grazed the purple plains. There were no meat eaters though, and for that she was thankful. This world, strange as it was, was a great big garden pulled straight from the mind of a young child.
The Stargate was situated in a clearing, in the centre of a rocky plateau where nothing grew. The animal life stayed away, and the plants could gain no foothold. The Ancients, if it was the Ancients who built the gates in this galaxy, had picked their spot well. Sam had doubts that they were in any way involved however - the symbols on the gate, and on what she took to be a DHD were not familiar to her. As the months stretched into years, she tried combination after combination, and like her early attempts to use the gate on Earth, suffered nothing but failure. Even if she did get lucky and guess a correct dialling sequence, without a kartouche like the one found on Abydos, there would be no way to compensate for stellar drift.
And if she did, where would she go? To another world just like this? There was no symbol for Earth on this gate, no familiar pyramid with a rising sun at the top, no image of home. She was lost. Lost in a galaxy far, far, away.