THE TROUBLE WITH STARGATES
'Unauthorized off world activation! Unauthorized off wo..." Sergeant Harriman stuttered to a halt, and turned as General Hammond stepped into the control room. "Uh...sorry, sir. It stopped in mid-cycle. Like before." They both stared out the window at the completely placid Gate. Three chevrons glowed uncertainly for a few seconds, then flickered and went dark. The Stargate sat, inert and silent.
In the Gateroom, the defense team waited.
General Hammond's eyes remained on the Gate. A minute passed. Two.
SG1 clattered up the stairs in a group, slid to a halt around the general.
"Again?!" Colonel O'Neill demanded.
Hammond nodded. "Again."
"How many times is that?" Jack asked
"Seven times in the past four hours," Carter said, already headed for the unoccupied computer station. "Should I run another diagnostic, sir?" she asked, looking toward Hammond.
Hammond glanced at her and then at Walter. "Anything different this time, sergeant?"
"No, sir."
"Waste of time," Jack muttered. "Sombody's messin' with us."
"Jack?" Daniel questioned, frowning.
"Y'know. Pullin' our legs. Yankin' our chains."
They all turned to look at him.
"What?" he demanded. "Didn't you ever just dial sombody's number and hang up before they could answer? Just for the fun of it? Just to know you were drivin' 'em crazy!"
Carter didn't bother to respond, simply turned back to the computer with a small eye-roll.
Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "Indeed not."
A guilty look sped across Daniel's face. Fortunately Jack was not looking at him—he'd have surely jumped on that!
Hammond made a faint noise in his throat. "This the Stargate, Jack. Not AT&T."
"General! Did you just make a joke?" O'Neill assumed an expression of fake shock.
"I think that was supposed to be sarcasm, Jack," Daniel, murmured quietly, and then subsided as Jack cut him a sidewise look.
"How many teams have returned in the past four hours, sergeant?" Hammond asked.
"Three, sir. SG-4, 7 and 16."
"Any problem when they dialed in?" Carter asked.
"No, sir."
"Any teams late or due to check in?" Jack wanted to know.
"No, sir. Nobody's late."
Silence descended. The only sounds were the hum of electronic equipment and the tapping of Carter's fingers on the computer keys.
"Why hasn't somebody invented a dial-back program for the Gate?" Jack asked into the quiet.
They all looked at him.
"What do you mean by dial-back program, O'Neill?" Teal'c asked.
"You know—well, I guess you wouldn't know, T. But everybody else here does. If you miss a call on your phone you can dial star-69 and it'll connect you with the last caller. Why don't we have that for the Stargate?"
One by one, eyes turned to Carter. Naturally! "You can't do that even on the phone unless the call has been connected, Colonel. If someone only dials the first three or four digits of my number, it doesn't connect on my phone," she said. "Until the wormhole is actually established, there would be no way for the computer to extrapolate a Gate address."
"Then why does our Gate start lighting up as soon as the first digits are dialed in?" Jack wanted to know.
"It doesn't, sir. There's a lag. The whole address is dialed at the source, and the wormhole is initiated by pressing the power crystal—however, the wormhole has to 'seek' its terminus. Once it finds that, then the target Gate dials and the wormhole connects. Just like your phone doesn't actually ring until the call is connected," she explained. "...Sir."
"So if our Gate even started to light up, that means the entire address was dialed at the source," Jack suggested.
Carter stared at him for several beats. "Yes. Sir. You're right..."
"He's right?!" Daniel interjected is astonishment. "He's...right?"
"Daniel," Jack warned.
For once Daniel did not respond with the expected 'Jack' rejoinder.
"Yes, he is," Carter conceded, reluctantly, it seemed to Jack. He narrowed his eyes at her. "However," she continued, "that means your theory that someone is 'messin' with us' can't be correct—since they obviously didn't hang up before they finished dialing." She couldn't hold back a grin. "Sir."
Jack frowned as he processed that, and then looked disappointed, which brought a snort from Daniel and caused Hammond to cover his mouth briefly in the pretense of scratching his nose. Jack glared at Daniel and waved a finger at him.
"Okay, so I was wrong about that," Jack agreed. "But I figured it out by myself!"
"Sure," Daniel said. "You figured out you were wrong after Sam set you right."
Jack gave him a slow glare, but Daniel just grinned.
General Hammond cleared his throat, simultaneously clearing the air of all levity. "So what does all that add up to, Major Carter?"
"Well, sir. Something is interrupting the establishment of a wormhole." She puckered her forehead in thought.
Jack thought the little pucker was adorable, and barely kept himself from grinning foolishly. As it was he missed the next part of her explanation.
"...probably all from the same source," Sam was saying.
"Why do you think so, Major?" Hammond asked.
"Because the Gate shut down at about the same point in the sequence all seven times, sir. It would be just an astronomical coincidence if more than one Gate had the same problem," she said. "And I don't think the trouble's at our end because several sites have dialed in successfully in that period of time."
"Who would be dialing us over and over again?" Jack wondered out loud. Carter's widened a little as she looked at him, surprised. "What?" he asked. "What did I say?"
"Well, you may be right, sir..."
"What! He's right twice in five minutes?" Daniel exclaimed.
"Shut up, Danny," Jack snapped. "I can be right sometimes. What am I right about, Carter?"
"That whoever's trying to dial in may be someone that does it a lot. Like the Alpha site. Walter, have we heard from the Alpha site today?"
"No, sir," Harriman answered. "Nor yesterday either."
Sam glanced at the General. "Dial the Alpha site, Sergeant," Hammond instructed.
However, once the wormhole was established, it was quickly determined that Alpha Site was not the source of the mystery.
"So what are the other possibilities?" Jack asked.
"Right now there are three long-term survey missions running, two mining operations, the Beta construction site..." Carter went on to name half a dozen more. "And that doesn't include friendlies like the Tok'ra and others."
"Get started contacting our own people," Hammond ordered. "And just to be safe, I'm delaying all outgoing gate travel until we're sure someone won't get stuck without a way home."
It was a little over an hour later when the Gate started to spin again. In the meantime, Carter and Harriman had contacted all of the long-term off world teams. No one had been trying to get through to them.
"Unscheduled off-world activation!" Harriman announced. The fourth chevron engaged, then the fifth. Looked like this connection was for real. The defense team was in place.
Hammond and all of SG1 were in the control room by the time the wormhole connected and the iris started to cycle shut. The titanium shield moved only a few inches, however, and then ground to a halt, leaving most of the event horizon unprotected.
"Walter!" Hammond snapped.
"It's not working, sir!"
"Stand-by defense teams to the gateroom!" Carter yelled into the microphone. Within seconds, the doors slid open and defense teams 2 and 3 poured in.
The event horizon sat placid and undisturbed.
"Any signal?" Hammond asked.
"Nothing, sir," Walter replied. At that moment the iris retracted.
"What the hell?" Jack exclaimed.
"We didn't do that, sir," Carter said.
The shimmering blue surface was silent.
"Shut down the Gate," Hammond ordered.
Nothing happened when Harriman typed in the code. Carter tried on her terminal.
"We can't shut it down, sir."
They waited. Thirty seconds. One minute...
A round, furry object fell through the gate at about shoulder height. It bounced twice on the ramp and sat there, jiggling and squeaking.
Within seconds, the first was followed by another and then another, and then they came faster and faster until there was a cascade of the objects, tumbling and spilling out onto the ramp. They ranged in size from 3 or 4 inches in diameter to about the dimensions of a basketball. Most were some shade of brown or tan, a few were white or black. They rolled and toppled down the ramp, impelled by the push of more coming through behind them. Every one seemed to be making the squeaky noise, and the entire heap was a mass of movement which now extended along the entire ramp, and out onto the floor, causing the defense teams to back away toward the walls. Finally the torrent began to slow down, became a trickle, stopped—and then one last furball popped through. The wormhole shut down.
Other than the wiggles and squeaks, nothing happened.
The leader of Defense Team 1 moved forward cautiously, and prodded the nearest object gently with the end of his P90. "It's purring!" he said in surprise.
Carter was staring at her terminal. "Sir, a message came through the gate before it closed."
"What does it say, Major?" Hammond demanded.
"Uh... it says, 'I hope these'll be no tribble for ye,' and it's signed 'Scotty.'"
"Oh, no!" Walter shrieked, springing to his feet. "I've seen this before!"
—And then suddenly, he was awake, heart pounding as he emerged from the nightmare. As he bolted upright on his couch, his eyes grew wide and he focused blurrily on the television, where the final scenes of his favorite Star Trek episode were just unfolding.
"Aye, the tribbles are all taken care of, sir," Scotty was saying to his Captain. "It took a wee while t'get the co-ordinates right, but they're gone now."
"What did you do with them?" Kirk demanded in a horrified voice. "You didn't...beam them out into space, did you?"
"Oh, no, sir," Scotty assured him. "I'd niver do sech a thing! I beamed 'em over into the Klingons' engine room—where I'm sure they'll be no tribble a'tall!"