Previously:

Having crashed on an unknown planet, three of Voyager's away team members have died in a firefight against an unkillable enemy before Sam Carter could use the UAV missile against it. A seriously injured Janeway tried to protect Carter when the attempt at destroying the supersoldier failed. The timely arrival of Jack O'Neill and Teal'c saved the day. Confused and wary about where these people came from, Kathryn Janeway only divulged her name and rank before losing consciousness.

Cheyenne Mountain

Sam lifted herself over the edge of the infirmary bed and carefully slid the loose-fitting uniform pants over her injured leg. Janet had just given her permission to leave the infirmary after checking her handy work. Twenty-six stitches must have been some sort of record even for the SG-1 team.

Balancing on one leg, she tightened the belt. Another stint in the Stargate Command infirmary, one of too many, but it felt good to be back at the base, safe and in one piece. She did not want to linger over what would have happened to her if it had not been for Teal'c and the colonel. She'd been so close to giving up the fight, waiting for her fate at the hands of a ruthless supersoldier rising from the earth.

"Hi, Carter. Want a lift home?"

She startled, staring into smiling dark eyes. O'Neill stood in his civvies at the end of her bed.

Home? Home was a cold and empty house. Pete had returned to Denver and wasn't due back for another fortnight. She should have phoned him—he was her boyfriend after all—but he wouldn't like to hear she'd been injured. As much as he said he understood the importance of what she was doing, she could not help thinking that sooner or later, her work at the SGC would come between them. Their relationship was too new, too raw. Too fragile. Or maybe it was just her.

She pushed the thought away.

"I need to go back to the planet, sir. That spacecraft, if it is one, is nothing I've seen before."

O'Neill shook his head. "The Alpha site is being evacuated. No in-going for a while until we are sure Anubis isn't coming back to check on his missing drones."

"But, sir—"

"No but. Hammond is recalling all the SG teams currently off Earth and has ordered two days leave for all frontline personnel. Teal'c has already gone back to Hak'tyl to see his girlfriend, and Daniel has left with Jacob. They are hoping to talk the Tok'ra into coming back to the table."

Carter nodded. Her father had come and seen her in the afternoon. He'd told her of the collapse of the alliance between Tok'ra, Jaffa and the Tau'ri, as they called Earth people, while she'd been playing hide and seek with the supersoldier for most of the day. She had not had the time to think of the ramifications of that disaster for Earth's defence against their common enemy.

"At least I should have a look at the weapon Captain Janeway was using. It emits some sort of energy beam, but different from the Goa'uld zat guns we use."

O'Neill's fingers drummed on the bed foot panel. "Carter."

She ignored the rising frustration she could hear in his voice, reached for her jacket instead and put it on. The infirmary was always too cold. "If I can duplicate the technology, we wouldn't have to rely on stealing Goa'uld weapons or begging the Tok'ra for some more. We could have our own production line and then scale the technology up—"

"Sam."

She flinched. It had been a long time since Jack had used her first name. She was Carter, he was 'sir' or 'Colonel'. 'Jack' and 'Sam' did not belong here. They never had.

When she looked at him, his face was showing an expression poised between amusement and exasperation. And maybe something else, but it was so fleeting and so wrong now there was a Pete in her life that she lowered her eyes again.

"Janeway's weapon will still be there in two days' time. Come on," O'Neill said, not leaving her the time to find another excuse to stay on the base. "I've got an appointment with a cold beer, but I don't think Janet will allow you to drive that bike of yours for the next few days. I'll give you a lift to your house."

He passed her a pair of crutches before striding off.

She grabbed the plastic handgrips, thankful he wasn't waiting on her. Her moment of weakness after the supersoldier had finally died had been…a moment of weakness. One that she could not afford to repeat—for both their sakes. They'd both stared for far too long at that fine line between comradeship and caring too much for each other to feel the need to point it out once again and apologise.

On leaving the infirmary, she nodded at the guard at the door and glanced back. If it had not been for the woman lying a couple of beds down from hers and still unconscious after surgery, she would not be going home. But the mystery that was Captain Kathryn Janeway would have to wait.

###

People lay on mattresses directly on the floor, the biobeds all occupied, sick bay overflowing as more came through the door for check-ups and to find a place to sleep. They were military from what Janeway could gather from the uniforms and salutes, apart from the white lab coats of the medical staff. They also all appeared to be human and spoke something so close to Standard she had little difficulty following their conversations, even if she hardly understood what they were talking about.

A military base the shuttle sensors had not detected. Humans living on a planet supposedly uninhabited. A class M planet orbiting a sun tens of thousands of light-years away from the Alpha quadrant last time she'd checked Voyager's astrometric map.

She needed to be sure. She needed to know, but all she could see were dark concrete surfaces, windowless walls, and unfamiliar but mostly recognisable technology. As long as she remained in sickbay, she would not discover where fate had landed her.

Leaving the needle grip inserted in her arm, she disconnected the drip. The pressure band on top to the right arm was next, then the small device stuck to the tip of one of her fingers. No alarms rang, and nobody came rushing at her side. Her bare feet touched the cold floor. The room swayed then righted itself as her brief spell of dizziness abated.

The man in the adjacent bed turned over, mouth agape, his hand brushing against her. She froze, but he continued snoring loudly and did not wake up.

Silently, she filched a baggy pair of khaki trousers and a shirt from the foot of his bed. The trousers were way too big, and she had to tie the belt into a knot to hold them in place, all the while thanking the local fashion for baggy uniforms. She'd kept the medical gown on, but the man's shirt proved more problematic. By the time she had threaded her left arm into the sleeve, she was trembling and sweating. Clenching her teeth, she glanced at the wall clock. She had twenty minutes before the next round of the doctor on the gamma shift, or whatever they called the graveyard duty hours here. She had to hurry.

Shoving a pair of socks down the over-sized boots, she stared at the laces undone to mid-ankle. These people liked to make simple things difficult. She pulled at the thin cords with one hand and hid the ends inside the shoes. The man's cap covered her gathered hair. She looked like another weary soldier, unable to find sleep.

To her relief, leaving the sickbay turned out to be the easy part. The guard at the door mumbled a vague 'sir', his nose in a book. Tuvok would have made mincemeat of him, she thought as she walked confidently down the corridor.

###

Fifteen minutes later, she took advantage of another group of people coming into the infirmary to slip back in unnoticed. She quickly undressed down to her gown and lay underneath the bed covers, leaving the lines dangling from their hooks behind her head. Hopefully, the medic would think she had pulled them off in her sleep.

Her shoulder felt like the shuttle had landed on it and was now trying to burrow into the bones, but it was nothing compared to the heartache clutching at her chest.

She did not know how it could be possible, could not fathom how she had all of a sudden found herself at the end of a journey that was supposed to last for seventy-odd years.

This planet was Earth.

Just not 'her' Earth.

The date was all wrong, the year glaring at her from the calendar pinned to the far wall of the busy mess hall.

February 2004.

She'd already been that far back in the past before. But on this occasion, there would be no twenty-ninth century timeship to return her to 2375. She was well and truly alone on an Earth she did not belong to.

The name she'd read on an evacuation diagram danced in her mind. Cheyenne Mountain had been a public shelter during World War III, but the place had a much longer history as a military base, she recalled from a strategy assignment she'd worked on in her second year at Starfleet Academy. A mini-city from what she'd seen on the plan; some twenty-eight floors buried deep underground, comprised of an armoury, dormitories, gyms, mess halls, holding cells and three floors of labs. Floor 21 was the infirmary.

And something called a Stargate and an Embarkation room occupying the three lower levels of one of the largest military bases of the time. The word 'Stargate' did not fit a pre-warp society who had yet to reach Mars or make first contact, according to what she knew of her Earth's history. But it might suit the people who had plucked her off a planet forty thousand light-years away and transported her back where her journey had started. Voyager would be lucky to complete that long trek within her lifetime.

Her head sunk a little deeper into the pillow. As if she had not had enough already of time travel paradoxes, now it looked like she had stumbled into an alternate universe. Similar but not close enough to call home, and that alone dictated what she must do.

She needed to get back to the shuttle, retrace her steps and return to her ship. Hopefully, it had not been drawn into the same morass, but she could not be sure some of those supersoldiers had not been sucked back into Voyager's universe. Wherever, whenever that world was.

The murmurs around her faded. Her eyes closed. She did not hear the nurse checking on her, did not feel the line being reconnected to her arm, did not notice the sedative added to the drip.

Instead, she dreamed of stars, of a lost white ship, and a man with dark hair holding her close, her head nestled in the crook of his shoulder.

###

In the dimness, Chakotay could hardly make up B'Elanna Torres and Seven bent over the main console of Voyager's Engineering room. It had been thirty hours since the shuttle had disappeared. The ship was at a standstill, its engines idle while half of the crew was frantically trying to find out the fate of four of their crewmates, while the other half was fighting strange drops of power all over the ship.

"Any progress?" he asked the two women. He would have been told if they had found something, anything. But he was sick of waiting for the negative reports to come to him in his office, or looking at downcast eyes during briefing meetings.

"It seems the chroniton wave we experienced was masking a concentrated burst of verteron particles," Seven said in her usual cool tone of voice. Her composure was unsettling Chakotay more than he dared to admit.

"Verteron particles? Aren't they associated with wormholes?" he asked. "A wormhole to where? And why was not I told about it before?"

"Given the size of the verteron pulse, the wormhole would have been too small for the shuttle to travel along it. That leaves me to conclude that its occupants are still in this system, most probably on the third planet."

"Where are they then?" Chakotay leaned over the console. "We've found no life signs. If the shuttle had been destroyed, we would have spotted debris, an ionised energy trail, traced their sub-space comms. There's nothing."

"We did detect something else. We were confirming our analysis when you came in. The verteron particles were time-shifted," Seven continued.

"A temporal wormhole? So what? If the shuttle was too small to enter it—"

"It could have been caught in the outflow of the vortex," B'Elanna offered.

Chakotay gritted his teeth. "So the shuttle could still be here, but in another timeline. That's really useful information."

"Don't shoot the messenger, Chakotay. Those readings don't make much sense but that's the best we've got for you for the moment. At least, it means they could still be alive," B'Elanna responded.

Chakotay put his hand through his short-cropped hair. This was hardly the time to snap at the crew. "Sorry, I know you are doing the best you can."

"To be honest, the only one who could make heads or tails of the situation is the captain," B'Elanna said in a conciliatory tone.

That was the catch of course. For all her dislike for temporal anomalies, Janeway was the best expert they had.

"Do you know what we did not find either on that planet?" Chakotay said. "There was no dilithium, not a trace of it. So why did she go there? It does not make any sense."

His hands gripped the edge of the console. This ship needs a Captain, he'd told Janeway when she had retreated into herself during the long journey through the void. The night outside had driving her into the black hole of her guilt-ridden mind. He had pushed her too hard, appealing to her sense of duty to draw her out, when he should have listened instead.

Since the attack which had led to their escaping the soul-destroying journey through the void, the captain had reappeared with a vengeance. She'd been obsessed with repairing what she saw, thanks to him, as her damaged standing among the crew, and had over-compensated by making decisions she called necessary, but were nothing short of reckless at best.

Her place was on the bridge. Not lost somewhere, somewhen.

Chakotay turned around and left Engineering.