Author's note: Thanks for all the reviews on the last chapter! McKay definitely is oblivious and focused more on Sam than he should be for this important mission, but luckily he has Sheppard to keep him on track. And chapter after this one, he'll be dealing with Jack O'Neill.
It wasn't as simple as sending a quick message to the Daedalus, but she wasn't expecting it would be.
After all, it wouldn't be a Stargate mission if it were simple.
First she had to look through the sensor data to determine the ship's position and calculate its ETA. The timing wasn't good. They only had about two hours. She started the countdown timer on her watch.
The communications systems in the puddle jumpers could transmit to the other side of the solar system, but they weren't as good as the Atlantis control room or the larger ships she'd come across and helped build over the years.
The Daedalus was too close, and yet not close enough.
Sam tried to boost the signal first, but she didn't have the right equipment to make a significant difference in range. She wasn't sure if it would be enough.
To up the odds, she decided to write a program to send the message every five minutes. That way, even if the Daedalus wasn't close enough to receive the message now, they would be once they reached the solar system.
It was a risk to transmit multiple times, but she'd have to take it.
Then Sam needed to write the message. She didn't have enough time to fully encrypt the message, and it probably would have been a bad idea anyway given that the Daedalus crew would need to receive the signal and decrypt it in time, but she still tried to use enough security protocols to hopefully slow down the Replicators in case they were able to intercept the message.
Sam hoped they were still too busy fixing the control room to be able to catch the message. If she was extremely lucky, they might not have brought those systems back online yet.
She paused with her fingers on the keyboard.
The guilt that she had successfully pushed away until now flooded her and threatened to pull her under.
Sam made the right decision out of a lot of bad options, but it didn't make her feel any better. The plan that she and McKay had put in place also put Jack in immediate danger. If the Replicators weren't already interrogating him and Woolsey, it was only a matter of time. Their plan relied on it.
She should have been doing just about anything to spare Jack more pain, but she had to prioritize destroying the Replicators instead.
She had considered, briefly, whether they could just break Woolsey and Jack out of the holding cell and escape in a jumper, but that lead to its own difficulties.
If they were able to escape, would they be able to get the underwater jumper bay door back open?
Could they plug the leak well enough to survive the underwater and interplanetary travel that would be required to escape? If not, were any of the other jumpers in that bay viable?
Could they make it to another 'gate and rewrite the macro to get back to the Milky Way before the Midway Station 'gates were destroyed? Or could they intercept with the Daedalus without the Replicators noticing or their own people treating them as an enemy vessel?
Even if they were able to get away from the city safely, what about the Replicators? If they left them here, unharmed, they would destroy countless planets and eventually come for Earth. She had no doubt about that.
As Sam began to write the encrypted message, she kept thinking back to her time with Fifth.
She had been naive the first time she encountered the human-form Replicators. She believed that Fifth was different enough, human enough, that he was worth saving. She felt disillusioned when Jack had signaled to her that they should leave Fifth behind during that initial encounter.
She followed his orders, but afterward she and Jonas had blamed Jack for using Fifth's humanity against him.
She knew now that they'd been unfair. Jack had only been making the best decision in a bad situation, just as she was doing now.
She may have been inside Fifth's head for a brief time, but that didn't mean she knew him. Bringing him back to Earth could have been the most disastrous decision ever made by an SG team and Sam was glad now that Jack held his ground, even if she did pay for it afterwards with her imprisonment by the Replicator.
She wasn't sure if her betrayal was the true root cause for Fifth's turn towards evil or Fifth's programming would have moved him in that direction regardless of any actions she took. It was a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario.
Either way, Sam knew that Jack wouldn't hold this decision against her because he would have had to make the exact same one if their positions were switched. The Replicators were a scourge and they had to take advantage of any opportunity to prevent them from causing more harm.
Sam finished the message and set it to loop, asking the Daedalus to refrain from releasing their payload unless no human lifeforms remained on Atlantis because they were in the midst of a rescue operation. She also included her name and personal authentication code. Unfortunately, she couldn't provide details about their plan in case the message was intercepted, but Sam hoped this would be good enough.
Once the message was sent, Sam grabbed her P90 and left the jumper, closing the rear hatch in case any Replicators came this way.
She and Sheppard had decided that it would be best for her to meet up with Teyla and Beckett after sending the message. Their final two emitters were the closest to the underwater jumper bay, so it would be easiest for Sam to catch up with them, and their team already had two ARGs. Based on the time she'd been in the jumper, Sam guessed that Teyla and Beckett would be at the second or third shield emitter by now. Luckily, the second was on the way to the third, so she'd pass by that regardless.
After she exited the jumper bay, Sam jogged down the corridor at a steady clip in the direction of Teyla's second emitter. She kept an eye out for any Replicators and kept her weapon at the ready.
She didn't see any Replicators, but when she rounded the corner near the second emitter room, she did see a body sprawled out on the floor.
Sam glanced at the face on instinct, not expecting to know the individual clad in the tan and off-white clothes common for the Ancients. Instead, she froze. The curly blonde hair, slightly upturned nose, pale skin, and dent in her chin...this was the woman Jack thought looked like Ke'ra. This was Commander Helia.
Her eyes were vacant and still, but the resemblance was uncanny. It had been years since they had encountered Ke'ra on Vyus, unaware that she was really the dangerous scientist Linea, but Sam remembered her well enough to recognize the woman. The body in front of her did appear how she imagined Ke'ra would have by now.
Sam wished that she could have done something for this woman to prevent her death or give her a proper burial. Maybe if they all survived, they could make sure something was done to honor the sacrifice of the Lanteans.
She didn't have time to worry about that now.
Sam picked up to the pace and ran in the direction of room that was second on Teyla and Beckett's list.
She couldn't think about dead bodies and personal sacrifices and what the Replicators might do to people who didn't give them the answers they wanted.
Sam couldn't think about Jack's stubbornness and the nightmares she still had from the torture she had to endure under Fifth - a being who claimed he loved her - and what might happen to Jack if he didn't break under interrogation from Replicators who had no interest in keeping him alive.
She didn't come all this way to lose Jack now. Sam might have made the decision that would leave him in the hands of the Replicators, but she had to make sure that choice was both worthwhile and temporary. She had to make sure that McKay's shield emitter plan succeeded.
Sam arrived at the room and looked inside, peeking around the corner to ensure that there weren't any Replicators there. There weren't but Teyla and Beckett weren't in the room either. Sam lowered her weapon and walked straight to the tray that held the shield emitter crystal and opened it, clicking on the third symbol to the left to open the tray.
She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that the crystal had been swapped out and the C-4 was in place. It meant that Teyla and Carson Beckett had already been here and left and hadn't run into any trouble on the way. That was a good sign.
Two down, one to go.
She raised her weapon and left the room, heading in the direction of the final emitter room that Teyla and Beckett were responsible for. She hoped that Weir and Ronon were making good progress.
Sam also wondered how things were going with McKay and Sheppard. She would have given just about anything to see Rodney McKay have to pass along her message to Jack. Hopefully that would lighten things up a little for him.
If should couldn't be there for him, if she couldn't get him out of there yet, if she couldn't prevent him from enduring likely pain...at least she could hope that she gave him something to smile about.
Hopefully, in less than two hours, Jack O'Neill would be standing in front of her alive and well. Then she'd have something to smile about too.