Sheppard sat across from Marie McKay and watched her carefully. She looked back at him, her eyebrows slightly raised and one hand drumming the table. "Do you have any more questions," asked Marie, finally breaking the silence, "or would you like another minute to admire my beautiful blue eyes?"
Sheppard gave her his trademark smile and leaned forward in his chair. "We can keep this going as long as it takes for me to get answers."
"But I've already told you everything!" Marie slammed her palms onto the table and regarded Sheppard with mingled frustration and fear. The latter merely raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his chair.
Marie had indeed answered every question with what sounded enough like the truth. The story was feasible, and it concurred with Rachel's version of events. According to the two girls, they were members of an SCG youth training group and had been scheduled to travel to Atlantis. They had been confused and alarmed by the hostility they had faced upon arrival. McKay had confirmed their story a couple of hours ago by returning with fully analyzed data and proclaiming that their guests were undoubtedly from a parallel reality. "It's like what happened at the SGC a few years ago," he had said, "you know, when dozens of SG-1s all arrived at the same reality."
"But the SCG eventually sent them back," Sheppard had said, sounding hopeful, "can't we just use Carter's calculations to do the same for these kids?"
"Ah, well, we have different variables do deal with this time."
"Which are what?" Woolsey had asked sounding wary.
"The SCG only had to deal with multidimensional displacement, which was easy enough to fix once Sam had the calculations down and a powerful enough energy source to carry out the process. We, however, have a time component to deal with."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that we have but a single window in time to send those girls back, and I have no idea when that is yet. Could be years from now, could be seconds."
"Wait, wait! How did that even happen?"
"Uh,
well, we're still working on that. But I think that some kind of
energy pulse must have have gone through the gate along with the
girls, and it acted like a – like a solar flare of some sort. They
could be from a fraction of a second to centuries away from their
actual time line. So its not just a matter of getting them back to
their own universe, but also to their own time. And the two are
intricately connected, so, no, we can't work on the two problems
separately."
"Well," Sheppard had said, trying to keep a note of optimism in his voice, "that...certainly complicates things a bit."
"Hmm, you're telling me," McKay had retorted with an exasperated eye roll, "I'm the one who's expected to pull a solution out of my ass."
So that had been that. McKay and Zelenka had been assigned with the task of getting Rachel and Marie back to their own time-space, while Sheppard was in charge gathering information. The latter job had become rather tricky. Though Marie's story had all the elements of truth, her body language did not. As she spoke, Marie's eyes darted from the table in front of her, to the walls surrounding her, and back to her chipped black nail polish. This resolute avoidance of eye contact felt wrong to Sheppard, so he looked for other signs of deceit. He searched Marie's face, but could see nothing behind the mask of calm composure. As she spoke, her voice was even and almost defiant in its confidence, as though daring Sheppard to find a flaw in her logic. He found none, yet he could not shake the feeling that the girl in front of him was keeping something back.
