Sam Carter was sitting by the fire in the early morning chill. She had just put the water on to boil for the first pot of coffee. It was the one amenity that all, well, three of them insisted on when they had a permanent campsite while on a mission. Real coffee. Teal'c wasn't much of a coffee drinker. He preferred his instant cocoa, or even plain hot water.
Watching the perimeter of their camp out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of some nocturnal creature watching her watching him. After a breath of time, the flashing eyes winked at her and disappeared into the early morning mist. There was a slight fog rising up off the lake that they were camped beside. The Colonel had tried fishing yesterday evening while she gathered the wood for the campfire. Daniel and Teal'c had wrangled over which M.R.E. to heat up for their dinner since not a lot of faith was put towards the fresh fish dinner that had been promised. The M.R.E.s really hadn't been that bad, if you liked the taste of mystery meat and macaroni stew. The fish were still safely in the lake.
It was the third and final day of this mission. She had just about finished gathering her mineral and flora samples. Today, she would just hike the outlying areas to insure she hadn't missed anything significant. Daniel would be puttering around the sheltered cliff walls attempting to translate the faint petroglyphs, which he said was reminiscent of the French Caves at, well in France anyway. Teal'c and the Colonel would be doing the guard thing again. They had learned that as soon as there was no guard, something showed up that should have been guarded against. It was just one of the many Laws of Murphy that invariably proved true for SG1.
She looked up in the pearlescent morning sky, watching the silvery moon slowly descend behind the heavily forested hills. The sun was just beginning to peek over the great mountain range behind her, casting her shadow into the campfire circle in front of her. It was peaceful here and it had been a good mission. Lots of potential discoveries that follow-up teams would have the time to investigate more thoroughly. That was the only sad thing about being on a first contact team; you didn't get to share in the real scientific phase of your work. Only the 'find, grab and run' aspects of it as Daniel liked to say. It was a feeling that she often shared with her fellow scientist. In the SGC you could be an explorer or a scientist, not both. And they had chosen however frustrated it made them at times.
Sam had always wanted to be the first one there; to see what could be seen before anyone else saw it. It had been a driving force in her early career years. "Get on the fast track, be the first, be the best, to go where no one had gone before." Yes, Captain Kirk had pointed her in the right direction; she just got there a little differently than he had meant.
As she sat holding her first cup of Daniel's real coffee of the morning, Sam thought back to her surprise encounter the previous Friday. She had been in the Base Exchange at Peterson Field when she ran into an old classmate of hers. Vicky Ryan and she had been the dynamic duo (or the terrible twins) at the Air Force Academy during their student days. They had always been in competition for best grades, best guys and ultimately the best assignments. Vicky had wanted to become a fighter pilot; but at that time women weren't authorized to fly combat missions so no jet fighter pilot assignments had been available. Vicky had wound up teaching her up-and-coming male counterparts and she wasn't too happy about it.
Sam had always wanted to be an Astronaut and was actually just about to meet the selection board when she had been called to assist some civilian consultants on a Top Secret Project. She had spent a year working with Kathryn Langford on the most amazing artifact she had ever seen. It wasn't the stars, but it was fascinating work...at least until General West had shown up.
The came the 'big bite', as her father Jacob Carter, had put it. General West was of the old brown-shoe Vietnam War era. Women were not supposed to be in the Military unless they were nurses or instructors or...whatever. They were not supposed to be dealing with TOP-SECRET government programs. Now, this one didn't work, but it was TOP SECRET so her new assignment to the Pentagon came through quickly. There she could work quietly and not be exposed to anything dangerous...or interesting...or important.
She continued to hear rumors about the mysterious wheel at the bottom of Cheyenne Mountain through the Air Force grapevine. That Kathryn had been forced to go recruit a rather odd individual on the off chance that the longhaired, wide-eyed, down and out civilian archeologist could make it work when some of the best scientific Military minds had failed miserably. Carter had vaguely heard of Doctor Jackson when she was still at NORAD. His name would come up occasionally from one of the Soft Scientists and usually in mocking, sarcastic tones.
But come whatever hell there was to pay, Kathryn had done it. She'd hired the guy literally off the street after his last disastrous presentation in Boston. Langford had done the young Archeologist no favors it seemed. She played Jackson as her hole card and West dealt her his Ace, one Colonel Jack O'Neill. Carter had imagined she could hear the explosion all the way in Washington DC.
But after the explosion...nothing. Not a bang, not a whimper. Through her old contacts, Sam discovered that the young Jackson had been killed in action, an accident with the device. Colonel O'Neill had returned to his quiet retirement and the rest of the team disbanded. The program was closed and the great artifact had been abandoned deep within The Cheyenne Mountain Complex. Her dad had congratulated her in her good timing for leaving soon enough. That she was no longer connected with Operation Stargate, a disastrous project that ostensibly left nothing of any interest except a big hole in that fiscal year's military budget.
So, Sam went back to aiming for the stars and the NASA Shuttle assignment. She'd lost a little ground against the competition but easily made it up. Rumors surrounded her that she was a sure bet for the next trip out.
But all ghosts don't lie quietly and filed documentation can reappear at any time. An old friend of her fathers, a Major General George Hammond, called her one evening at her apartment. He'd been assigned his home base assignment for retirement purposes, at NORAD. His job was to dismantle the Stargate and bury it far from the political and monetary attention of the Taxpaying Public. But now, much to his dismay, he had a real situation at Cheyenne Mountain. He needed her on the project. Kathryn Langford was unavailable, O'Neill retired, Jackson dead, the team of experts scattered to the four winds. Hammond needed an Expert and she was it! This was her notification to pack; hard copy PCS orders enroute. So seventy-two hours later, Captain Samantha Carter was back on a plane, enroute to Peterson Field and her appointment with destiny.
It hadn't been hard to act sympathetic to her old Academy rival. Neither of them had quite accomplished what they had started out to do. Sam had listened to Vicky bitch about the young student pilots that she was supposed to be molding into cracker-jack jet jockeys. But she felt a little embarrassed when the other Major had offered her compassion for her boring career in Long Range Space Telemetry. How it was sad, her being stuck in the bottom of that mountain, for not becoming a Shuttle Pilot. How the two best women in their class at the Academy had not accomplished their plans and potentials. How their dreams had died and gone to nothing.
Sam Carter got up and stretched, picked up her P-90 and did a final perimeter circuit. The men would be up soon. Teal'c would emerge from his meditations and offer his solid presence and support. The often late, but very much alive, Daniel Jackson would be chivied from his bedroll by the early morning antics of their Team- Chief, the not-so-retiring Colonel Jack O'Neill. They would greet the early morning with the customs and habits that they had developed in their long association with each other. SG-1 would soon be on the move again and there would be no time for thoughts of her faded dreams of yesterday.