Chapter 6 – Revelations
Elapsed time on board (ETOB): LD Plus 14. Elapsed time at origin (ETAO): LD Plus 14 days 21 hours
Life on Prometheus and its tethered bio-pod could never actually be described as falling into a routine as the pair plunged through inter- galactic space, but at times it had begun to seem like it to the crew. Safety checks, instrument calibration, eat, wash, sleep, cook, clean, record, log, discuss. The on-board computers were designed to do little more than align the telescopes and repackage data in a form that could be stored and transmitted back to Earth via the sub-space communicator. There, whole networks of linked research stations were taking apart and analysing the received signals, removing distortions due to the ship's relativistic motion, Doppler shift, Lorentz contraction and light aberration. Not to mention of course, correcting for the minute variations in the orbits of Prometheus and its pod as they swung lazily round each other. Ironically, the astronauts depended on Earth's transmissions to show them the true value of the data that they were gathering.
On board, the familiar concept of a twenty-four hour 'day' had been retained so that effects on the crew's biorhythms were minimised. But as the only naked eye view from the ports was one of infinite, unchanging, velvety blackness strewn with points and streaks of light – albeit arranged in a breathtaking display that could mesmerise if they let it – it soon became more convenient to carry out their duties as 'red shift' and 'blue shift', rather than 'day' or 'night' – the astronomers' pun being obvious even to Jack. And the longer they continued to cruise at high speed relative to the Earth, the greater the difference in elapsed time became.
"In two of our days," mused Vittorio Avagnaro as he gazed up at the master chronometer, "my last ex-wife will be a whole day nearer my age. Perhaps, if we arrive back on Earth at the right moment, she will have used the extra time to better appreciate what she lost."
"Or use it to rest after celebrating your departure." said Jocelyn Stevens in an acid tone. "Vittorio, if this ship were powered by testosterone, I swear I'd have you strapped into the engine room for the duration. Give us a break, will you?" She turned from the screen and looked up through the ceiling view port in the direction of the tether to see a small point of light emitted by the min-pod's searchlight moving slowly across her field of view. "There's O'Neill now." she stated. "I swear, if he's bringing back that pod with nothing but lettuce again from his gardening trip, I'll....."
"You'll what?" laughed Vittorio. "You can't intimidate him like you can the rest of us, you know." She looked sharply at him. "Yeah, even me, Jos." he continued. "And I really don't know why you treat him like you do. What's he done to upset you? It can't be when he laid into Sesele to get back here before he ran out of oxygen. You know he was doing the right thing then, OK? It's like you don't want him here at all."
Stevens reflected a minute before replying. "That's partly true, Vittorio." she confided. "This mission is too important for passengers, and that's what he is. Sure, he's carrying out whatever duties I've allocated to him – and don't look at me like that, you know that 'scope time is much too valuable to have the real scientists on board diverted onto menial housekeeping stuff. It wasn't my choice to have a security officer along for the ride, and particularly not one whose military mindset is going to rub the rest of us up the wrong way."
"Mohammad respects him, probably more as a result Jack's words." replied Avagnaro. "I think he's OK too – for a soldier, anyway. Chen and Meyer treat him like an uncle, so what's the problem?"
Stevens was formulating a reply when Jack's voice cut in from the intercom.
"O'Neill here. Are you ready to record the camera shots of the ice?"
"Affirmative." said Stevens. "Start rolling." She pressed the multi- frequency recorder start button and watched the visual content of the data coming in as Jack steered the mini-pod slowly around the ice nose cone of the Prometheus, its cameras and multi-wavelength sensors combing every square centimetre of the protective shield to check for flaws or damage.
"What do you think is going on between him and Sam Carter?" said Vittorio.
"What do you mean?" asked Stevens, not deflecting her gaze from the screen and various readouts.
"Oh come on, Jos." he laughed. "The sub-space link may not have high- quality sound, but have you heard some of their exchanges? She never tells me to look after myself the way she does when she's talking to him. And something in their private messages has changed his outlook. The first few days into the mission, he was like a monk, wasn't he? Chen says he's changed too."
"As long as those two military geniuses aren't cooking up anything to disrupt the mission, it's none of my business." she replied coldly, dissuading him from further speculation. Well, in her presence, anyway.
Vittorio's eye caught something on a smaller side monitor. In a sea of green characters on a black screen, a group of yellow digits was conspicuous. "Hey, Jos, there may be something here. The naquadria reactor is showing short-lived core temperature excursions reaching zero point two degrees Celsius above normal."
"Regular pattern to the peaks?" she enquired, still looking at pictures of the ice nose cone.
"No, just occasional spikes." he answered. "Nothing to worry about, though. The generator's powered down to minimum just to run life support and the electronics. Probably we just haven't noticed it before when the engines and grav generator are on line."
"I agree." said Stevens. "We'll monitor the pattern once a day anyway until we start to reel in the bio-pod in three days time, before we make the next wormhole jump."
"OK, you're the boss." he murmured as he typed the commands on the keyboard, little realising that the parameters he was setting were inadequate for that particular task.
XXXXXXXXXXXX
The good-natured banter around the communal dinner table at shift change had been inspired by the news from Earth. The first multi-wavelength images of the Milky Way Galaxy had been presented, to the acclamation of astronomers and other specialists everywhere. The enormous magnifying power of their huge rotating telescope was revealing details, patterns, objects and just sheer poetic images of breathtaking clarity. The galactic centre, for so long a large white, fuzzy, impenetrable 'blob' of starlight in the eyepieces of telescopes, now showed filigree dust elements, clusters of star clusters, gas clouds in rainbow colours, double stars, matter spiralling to extinction in black holes – in truth, the real fabric of creation. Until the data had been sent back to them, the astronauts themselves had seen only the moderately-magnified vista of the galaxy through Jack's four-inch refractor.
Photo after photo changed hands around the table, along with not a few graphs showing plots measuring radiation at wavelengths from X-Ray to far infra red. These meant less to Jack than the others, but he too was taken with the visible light images.
O'Neill, Stevens and Avagnaro retired to their private sleeping cabins after dinner while Chen, Meyer and Selese took over the duties of blue shift. As usual, after attending to personal hygiene as well as possible in view of the limited quantities of fresh water on Prometheus, each of the retirees took the opportunity to catch up on their personal logs and message recordings before settling to sleep in the ultra-relaxing softness of one-sixth gravity.
Jack wondered what he was going to say on his recording for Sam tonight. Sure, there was the daily news and the added excitement of seeing the results of their handiwork for the first time, but the rest seemed like it could become a routine work report unless he could think of something different. He pondered over how their messages to each other were becoming something that he both looked forward to, yet fretted over at the same time. She seemed to be trying to build a bridge back to him, having previously disappeared from his personal, non-work-related horizons for so long. He couldn't understand why, unless their heated moment at Daniel's house over a month before was haunting her the same way it was him. Surely not. Her man had turned up to claim her, and as usual Jack had instantly put up the shutters on emotions that had all too briefly threatened to run away with him. The pain of losing someone he cared about for a third time in his life was to be minimised out of necessity more than anything else. He may have been an expert at not showing hurt, but he felt it just as deeply as any man, even to the point of black despair where life no longer seemed worth continuing. Was his participation in this voyage a real opportunity to get away to the start of a new life, or an act of deep cowardice? He was no longer sure.
But here she was every night on disc, apparently concerned for his welfare and talking about the things that meant something to him back on Earth – hockey results, life at the SGC, news of their colleagues, as well as selected greetings from the hundreds around the world who had contacted the TV studio, many of whom seemed genuinely interested in him. In response, he included short personal greetings back to some of them – particularly to children and institutions that cared for them, like shelters and hospitals – as part of his message to her, knowing that she would carry out her promise to forward them.
He inserted the disc holding Sam's latest message into the small player propped on the end of his bunk, and took up pencil and paper to record the names of people to whom he could send return greetings. But as it turned out tonight, as the disc played, not a word was written.
The first thing that Jack noticed was that Sam had positioned herself closer to the camera than normal, and whether he wanted to or not, he could detect almost every line of her face, every nuance of her expression on the screen. His heart rate increased in anticipation of the unexpected, and that it certainly was. She paused for a few seconds before her eyes focussed directly on the camera lens, and she appeared to be having difficulty in starting to enunciate her words. Eventually her voice broke through, soft and faltering at first and making the hairs on his neck stand up, but strengthening as she continued.
"Jack, I've come to realise that I can't go on living a lie, and I will understand if you don't want to carry on with these messages after this. But I've had a lot of time on my own just lately to figure out what's right and what's not, and I'm not very proud of myself right now, I can tell you."
Jack's eyes closed in the nauseous anticipation of ultimate defeat, receiving a modern version of a 'Dear John' letter being delivered at a record distance for mankind. He reached for the 'off' button before he would have to suffer the hurt once more, but fortunately his reflexes were too slow and her voice continued.
"I love you, Jack. I love you." There was a pause during which both parties seemed to be frozen in position. He stared open-mouthed at the screen, his hand still stretched out towards the machine.
"I don't know how this will go down with you after everything I've done over the last three years." Sam's recording continued. "You probably think I'm not worth it any more, because God knows, I don't think I am. I've driven you away from me ever since I should have had the guts to do whatever was necessary to be with you, irrespective of our military ranks at the time.
I know too just how much you cared for me in those days, and not just because of our confessions to an alien lie detector. I felt the same as you, and I still do. It took Daniel, and Teal'c too, to remind me of the friendship we had on SG-1, and I kind of threw that out of the window as well, didn't I?"
Jack sat back on his bunk, unsure of just what he was feeling at this revelation. He recognised instantly that she had had to overcome as many mental barriers as he would have done himself in making such a statement face-to-face, let alone in front of a camera, not knowing how the other would react on seeing it. Suddenly realising that his own thoughts had shut out the outside world, he reached forward and re-wound the track to the point where Sam had started speaking again.
"You're probably wondering where this is leading, Jack. Because if I don't do things right, you'll be missing from my life for a long, long time, even if it's only months to you. I know that I don't want that to happen. But if you still feel for me in the way I think you do, I'll not let you down again, I promise. Just let me know, OK? Whatever. I know I don't deserve you, and that you'll probably not want to send a message back straight away. That's OK. I won't reveal any of this in our regular communications over the sub-space channel – we've both got jobs to do, right? That's funny, isn't it? Concealing how I feel about you in public – as if we haven't done it in the past!
Look, just take your time in replying, and be honest with me, Jack. If you don't want this, just tell me. I have no-one in my life any more except you, and I've come to realise that the last three years have been the biggest mistake I ever made. I've hurt Pete, and I've hurt you even more, when I should have...... Never mind. You know, I know you do. I'll say sorry, but it doesn't seem to.......
I'm gabbling, aren't I? But you should know that this is the fifth time I've recorded this message, and it doesn't seem as though it's going to get any better. Over to you, Jack. I do love you."
XXXXXXXXXXXX
Elapsed time on board (ETOB): LD Plus 14. Elapsed time at origin (ETAO): LD Plus 14 days 21 hours
Life on Prometheus and its tethered bio-pod could never actually be described as falling into a routine as the pair plunged through inter- galactic space, but at times it had begun to seem like it to the crew. Safety checks, instrument calibration, eat, wash, sleep, cook, clean, record, log, discuss. The on-board computers were designed to do little more than align the telescopes and repackage data in a form that could be stored and transmitted back to Earth via the sub-space communicator. There, whole networks of linked research stations were taking apart and analysing the received signals, removing distortions due to the ship's relativistic motion, Doppler shift, Lorentz contraction and light aberration. Not to mention of course, correcting for the minute variations in the orbits of Prometheus and its pod as they swung lazily round each other. Ironically, the astronauts depended on Earth's transmissions to show them the true value of the data that they were gathering.
On board, the familiar concept of a twenty-four hour 'day' had been retained so that effects on the crew's biorhythms were minimised. But as the only naked eye view from the ports was one of infinite, unchanging, velvety blackness strewn with points and streaks of light – albeit arranged in a breathtaking display that could mesmerise if they let it – it soon became more convenient to carry out their duties as 'red shift' and 'blue shift', rather than 'day' or 'night' – the astronomers' pun being obvious even to Jack. And the longer they continued to cruise at high speed relative to the Earth, the greater the difference in elapsed time became.
"In two of our days," mused Vittorio Avagnaro as he gazed up at the master chronometer, "my last ex-wife will be a whole day nearer my age. Perhaps, if we arrive back on Earth at the right moment, she will have used the extra time to better appreciate what she lost."
"Or use it to rest after celebrating your departure." said Jocelyn Stevens in an acid tone. "Vittorio, if this ship were powered by testosterone, I swear I'd have you strapped into the engine room for the duration. Give us a break, will you?" She turned from the screen and looked up through the ceiling view port in the direction of the tether to see a small point of light emitted by the min-pod's searchlight moving slowly across her field of view. "There's O'Neill now." she stated. "I swear, if he's bringing back that pod with nothing but lettuce again from his gardening trip, I'll....."
"You'll what?" laughed Vittorio. "You can't intimidate him like you can the rest of us, you know." She looked sharply at him. "Yeah, even me, Jos." he continued. "And I really don't know why you treat him like you do. What's he done to upset you? It can't be when he laid into Sesele to get back here before he ran out of oxygen. You know he was doing the right thing then, OK? It's like you don't want him here at all."
Stevens reflected a minute before replying. "That's partly true, Vittorio." she confided. "This mission is too important for passengers, and that's what he is. Sure, he's carrying out whatever duties I've allocated to him – and don't look at me like that, you know that 'scope time is much too valuable to have the real scientists on board diverted onto menial housekeeping stuff. It wasn't my choice to have a security officer along for the ride, and particularly not one whose military mindset is going to rub the rest of us up the wrong way."
"Mohammad respects him, probably more as a result Jack's words." replied Avagnaro. "I think he's OK too – for a soldier, anyway. Chen and Meyer treat him like an uncle, so what's the problem?"
Stevens was formulating a reply when Jack's voice cut in from the intercom.
"O'Neill here. Are you ready to record the camera shots of the ice?"
"Affirmative." said Stevens. "Start rolling." She pressed the multi- frequency recorder start button and watched the visual content of the data coming in as Jack steered the mini-pod slowly around the ice nose cone of the Prometheus, its cameras and multi-wavelength sensors combing every square centimetre of the protective shield to check for flaws or damage.
"What do you think is going on between him and Sam Carter?" said Vittorio.
"What do you mean?" asked Stevens, not deflecting her gaze from the screen and various readouts.
"Oh come on, Jos." he laughed. "The sub-space link may not have high- quality sound, but have you heard some of their exchanges? She never tells me to look after myself the way she does when she's talking to him. And something in their private messages has changed his outlook. The first few days into the mission, he was like a monk, wasn't he? Chen says he's changed too."
"As long as those two military geniuses aren't cooking up anything to disrupt the mission, it's none of my business." she replied coldly, dissuading him from further speculation. Well, in her presence, anyway.
Vittorio's eye caught something on a smaller side monitor. In a sea of green characters on a black screen, a group of yellow digits was conspicuous. "Hey, Jos, there may be something here. The naquadria reactor is showing short-lived core temperature excursions reaching zero point two degrees Celsius above normal."
"Regular pattern to the peaks?" she enquired, still looking at pictures of the ice nose cone.
"No, just occasional spikes." he answered. "Nothing to worry about, though. The generator's powered down to minimum just to run life support and the electronics. Probably we just haven't noticed it before when the engines and grav generator are on line."
"I agree." said Stevens. "We'll monitor the pattern once a day anyway until we start to reel in the bio-pod in three days time, before we make the next wormhole jump."
"OK, you're the boss." he murmured as he typed the commands on the keyboard, little realising that the parameters he was setting were inadequate for that particular task.
XXXXXXXXXXXX
The good-natured banter around the communal dinner table at shift change had been inspired by the news from Earth. The first multi-wavelength images of the Milky Way Galaxy had been presented, to the acclamation of astronomers and other specialists everywhere. The enormous magnifying power of their huge rotating telescope was revealing details, patterns, objects and just sheer poetic images of breathtaking clarity. The galactic centre, for so long a large white, fuzzy, impenetrable 'blob' of starlight in the eyepieces of telescopes, now showed filigree dust elements, clusters of star clusters, gas clouds in rainbow colours, double stars, matter spiralling to extinction in black holes – in truth, the real fabric of creation. Until the data had been sent back to them, the astronauts themselves had seen only the moderately-magnified vista of the galaxy through Jack's four-inch refractor.
Photo after photo changed hands around the table, along with not a few graphs showing plots measuring radiation at wavelengths from X-Ray to far infra red. These meant less to Jack than the others, but he too was taken with the visible light images.
O'Neill, Stevens and Avagnaro retired to their private sleeping cabins after dinner while Chen, Meyer and Selese took over the duties of blue shift. As usual, after attending to personal hygiene as well as possible in view of the limited quantities of fresh water on Prometheus, each of the retirees took the opportunity to catch up on their personal logs and message recordings before settling to sleep in the ultra-relaxing softness of one-sixth gravity.
Jack wondered what he was going to say on his recording for Sam tonight. Sure, there was the daily news and the added excitement of seeing the results of their handiwork for the first time, but the rest seemed like it could become a routine work report unless he could think of something different. He pondered over how their messages to each other were becoming something that he both looked forward to, yet fretted over at the same time. She seemed to be trying to build a bridge back to him, having previously disappeared from his personal, non-work-related horizons for so long. He couldn't understand why, unless their heated moment at Daniel's house over a month before was haunting her the same way it was him. Surely not. Her man had turned up to claim her, and as usual Jack had instantly put up the shutters on emotions that had all too briefly threatened to run away with him. The pain of losing someone he cared about for a third time in his life was to be minimised out of necessity more than anything else. He may have been an expert at not showing hurt, but he felt it just as deeply as any man, even to the point of black despair where life no longer seemed worth continuing. Was his participation in this voyage a real opportunity to get away to the start of a new life, or an act of deep cowardice? He was no longer sure.
But here she was every night on disc, apparently concerned for his welfare and talking about the things that meant something to him back on Earth – hockey results, life at the SGC, news of their colleagues, as well as selected greetings from the hundreds around the world who had contacted the TV studio, many of whom seemed genuinely interested in him. In response, he included short personal greetings back to some of them – particularly to children and institutions that cared for them, like shelters and hospitals – as part of his message to her, knowing that she would carry out her promise to forward them.
He inserted the disc holding Sam's latest message into the small player propped on the end of his bunk, and took up pencil and paper to record the names of people to whom he could send return greetings. But as it turned out tonight, as the disc played, not a word was written.
The first thing that Jack noticed was that Sam had positioned herself closer to the camera than normal, and whether he wanted to or not, he could detect almost every line of her face, every nuance of her expression on the screen. His heart rate increased in anticipation of the unexpected, and that it certainly was. She paused for a few seconds before her eyes focussed directly on the camera lens, and she appeared to be having difficulty in starting to enunciate her words. Eventually her voice broke through, soft and faltering at first and making the hairs on his neck stand up, but strengthening as she continued.
"Jack, I've come to realise that I can't go on living a lie, and I will understand if you don't want to carry on with these messages after this. But I've had a lot of time on my own just lately to figure out what's right and what's not, and I'm not very proud of myself right now, I can tell you."
Jack's eyes closed in the nauseous anticipation of ultimate defeat, receiving a modern version of a 'Dear John' letter being delivered at a record distance for mankind. He reached for the 'off' button before he would have to suffer the hurt once more, but fortunately his reflexes were too slow and her voice continued.
"I love you, Jack. I love you." There was a pause during which both parties seemed to be frozen in position. He stared open-mouthed at the screen, his hand still stretched out towards the machine.
"I don't know how this will go down with you after everything I've done over the last three years." Sam's recording continued. "You probably think I'm not worth it any more, because God knows, I don't think I am. I've driven you away from me ever since I should have had the guts to do whatever was necessary to be with you, irrespective of our military ranks at the time.
I know too just how much you cared for me in those days, and not just because of our confessions to an alien lie detector. I felt the same as you, and I still do. It took Daniel, and Teal'c too, to remind me of the friendship we had on SG-1, and I kind of threw that out of the window as well, didn't I?"
Jack sat back on his bunk, unsure of just what he was feeling at this revelation. He recognised instantly that she had had to overcome as many mental barriers as he would have done himself in making such a statement face-to-face, let alone in front of a camera, not knowing how the other would react on seeing it. Suddenly realising that his own thoughts had shut out the outside world, he reached forward and re-wound the track to the point where Sam had started speaking again.
"You're probably wondering where this is leading, Jack. Because if I don't do things right, you'll be missing from my life for a long, long time, even if it's only months to you. I know that I don't want that to happen. But if you still feel for me in the way I think you do, I'll not let you down again, I promise. Just let me know, OK? Whatever. I know I don't deserve you, and that you'll probably not want to send a message back straight away. That's OK. I won't reveal any of this in our regular communications over the sub-space channel – we've both got jobs to do, right? That's funny, isn't it? Concealing how I feel about you in public – as if we haven't done it in the past!
Look, just take your time in replying, and be honest with me, Jack. If you don't want this, just tell me. I have no-one in my life any more except you, and I've come to realise that the last three years have been the biggest mistake I ever made. I've hurt Pete, and I've hurt you even more, when I should have...... Never mind. You know, I know you do. I'll say sorry, but it doesn't seem to.......
I'm gabbling, aren't I? But you should know that this is the fifth time I've recorded this message, and it doesn't seem as though it's going to get any better. Over to you, Jack. I do love you."
XXXXXXXXXXXX
