Author's Note: The next few chapters deal with some of the aspects of their survival and exploration of their new planet. There's a little light banter, a few warm-fuzzies, some planetary-science technospeak and then a little cliffhanger at the end of Chapter 14... :) Muse is taking the ship slow... these two are still in the process of 'building the ship.'
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Back to the story:
At the end of the evening, as Sam headed to bed and Jack settled in for the first watch, he asked with his customary smirk, "So, do you think that will save you from talking to trees?"
"I'm not sure," she responded to his surprise, "I'll let you know after a few days," and she gave him a grin before crawling into her sleeping bag.
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Ch 12: DELETING MONDAY
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The second week passed a bit more slowly than the first week. They finished the basics of their rudimentary shelter and camp which was situated in that clearing where they'd woken up that first day. Sam had wired an alarm that would go off if an incoming wormhole was established. The alarm would be silent in the area around the gate, but would be received on some of the equipment that had been in the stores of supplies. Solar rechargers again allowed them the reassurance that they would not be left unprotected after a few weeks.
The clearing was far enough from the 'Gate that newly-arriving hostiles would not be able to immediately take them by surprise, yet the clearing was close enough to the 'Gate that they would hopefully not miss the arrival of friends or allies.
They were still maintaining the night watches, although they had discovered and set-up a camp alarm system that utilized motion sensors and lasers. They had yet to see any other sentient beings... or even any large animals... hostile or not.
Small game abounded in the form of rodents, small animals similar to rabbits and raccoons and fish. Insects were common... and they both hated the local equivalent of spiders... these had an extra 4 legs as well as a mucous coating that was just... well disgusting. The greenish-yellow-grey color didn't help either.
Something like small gnats swarmed around 3pm and seemed to prefer the brightest pockets of sunlight beaming through the trees. The two of them often took refuge in the shade near the river to wait out the flying hordes.
They each had a few small bug bites, but so far neither of their immune systems had reacted to anything of consequence. Apparently the alien bugs and venom didn't like Tauri blood or flesh. And both officers were quite allright with that!
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Food was an important concern. The supplies contained enough rations and asundry food items to cover their needs for roughly seven or eight weeks. After that, however, they would have to survive on whatever the planet could provide. As a result, they needed to start testing the native foods to determine what was safe and what was dangerous.
They would need meat, fruits and vegetables to start with. Just in case their initial native diet was lacking in any essential vitamins or minerals, they had vitamin supplements in the stores of supplies that should last for 4-5 months, as there was only the two of them. After the vitamin supplements ran out, they would just have to hope that the native food provided enough of a balance for their bodies to remain healthy.
For meat, they started by zatting one of the native rabbit-looking critters. Roasting the meat over a fire, Jack insisted on being the first guinea pig and he ate just an ounce or so. Chewing carefully, he proclaimed it a bit tough and stringy, but with a flavor more like venison than chicken. They both waited and watched apprehensively throughout the next day to see if his system was going to reject the alien food. Other than a slight case of the 'runs', however, there appeared to be no other side effects and they declared that the rabbit-like creatures were on their new menu.
Two days later, Jack returned from a water-run to the river with another of the zatted, small critters. Roasting it over the fire as they had done with the first one, they had their first native entree.
They collected samples of the native vegetation that appeared potentially edible. One plant revealed purple-blue carrot-like tuber roots which looked extremely promising. A small brushy plant had some small fruits which were similar to a cross between an apricot and an orange.
Sam played guinea-pig for the small fruits and when their one-day trial period passed, Jack tested them as well. The purple-blue carrots also went over well with both of them.
Jack, on the other hand, spent 7 hours groaning from stomach pain after testing one of the yellow-green elliptical fruits of some small gnarled trees.
The process of identifying the safe vs. dangerous foods was going to take time. And they were going to have to be extremely careful, because if they were unlucky enough to encounter something that was poisonous in very small quantities, they would have no hospital to take refuge in.
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So far, the weather had been extremely hospitable. The days had been pleasant in the 60s to low 80s (Fahrenheit) during the day, while dropping to the 40s and low 50s at night. They didn't know what local season it was, nor how severe the seasons would get. Neither of them could remember any warnings regarding the weather from their memories of the reconnaissance surveys of this planet.
Sam had built a small sextant and was taking measurements of the angle of the sun at local noon. Adding this to the data about the angle of the rotational axis from the night sky and they would eventually be able to figure out this planet's axial tilt with respect to its sun. This would explain a lot about the severity or intensity of the weather that they could expect.
Watching the stars traverse the night sky, they quickly identified the star that was closest to the local equivalent of Earth's Polaris (The North Star). Jack named it Oz and the name stuck when all Sam did was try and smother one of her half-smiles.
Sam patiently measured the declination between the local magnetic north and the planet's rotational axis (geographic north) as determined from Oz's azimuth. Calibrating their compasses accordingly, they would be able to navigate with either their compasses or the night sky... if the sky was clear enough.
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This planet had a 28-hour day and they currently had approximately 18 hours of daylight followed by 10 hours of night. They both had the special SGC offworld watches that allowed them to keep one mode set at SGC local time on Earth, while they could set the second mode to match the natural daily clock and calendar of any alien world that they visited. Sam set both of their watches so that they measured a 28-hour day and so that local noon matched when the sun was at its highest elevation.
For civilians, this new 28-hour day would have been divided into midnight to 'fourteen-o'clock PM' (local noon), and then noon to fourteen-o'clock AM (midnight). However, military time actually meant that the two officers simply read the 28-hour day as midnight to 1400 (fourteen hundred) and then on to 2800 (twenty-eight hundred) for midnight. Unlike civilians who would find thirteen o'clock and fourteen o'clock strange, the military officers had to adjust to the new late night hours of 2500 (twenty-five hundred), 2600 (twenty-six hundred), etc.
They realized that their longer local day meant that every 6 days here were equivalent to 7 calendar days on Earth. As a result, they decided to establish a 6-day local week, so that they could easily compare weeks passed both here and on Earth.
Deciding to stick to the 'regular' names for the days of the week, they had to decide which day to cut out of their calendar. Sam, being logical, stated that it would probably be the easiest to remove a day from either the beginning or the end of the week... hence, she recommended removing either Sunday or Monday from their local week.
"We have to keep Sunday. No discussion. No one removes a part of the weekend from my calendar!" Jack insisted and Sam simply rolled her eyes in amusement. "Now everyone hates Mondays!" he continued animatedly. "So we cut out Monday!" He declared.
She shook her head while smiling at his words and tone. "Allright, Mondays are hereby gone," and she tapped a few buttons on her watch, "and our local week is now Tuesday through Sunday." That would mean that they would be basically in-synch with the SGC calendar on Tuesdays and would slide progressively out of synch until Sunday. Monday would then never happen here and they would jump to Tuesday.
"Sam, do you know how many people on Earth would love to be able to cut Mondays out of their calendars?" he asked her.
"I don't hate Mondays, Jack," she countered just for the banter.
"Aw, come on, Sam, you've never hated Mondays?" he protested with disbelief. "Not even when you were a kid and had to get up and go to school?" and then he realized that that was a mistake... he'd forgotten who he was talking to, and her raised eyebrow told him all he needed to know... she'd liked school! "OK, there has to have been sometime in your life when you hated Mondays! Everyone does!"
She looked thoughtful, "Well, I have to admit that I didn't look forward to Mondays after I got transferred off of the Stargate project and sent to the Pentagon," she admitted.
He looked over at her sympathetically and his thoughts wandered back in time as she worked on setting the local calendar on his watch. He'd looked thoroughly into her background and personnel records after Hammond had told him that he had no choice but to have the young scientist on his team over eight years ago. Her evaluations and personnel records indicated and described a brilliant mind and an excellent officer. Most of her CO's had been loathe to allow her to move on from their commands.
So he'd wondered, why hadn't she been there when they'd gone through the gate the first time? It wasn't in her records. Just the standard transfer paperwork sending her to the Pentagon shortly before Katherine Langford enticed Daniel to attempt to translate the symbols on the gate.
Before SG-1's first mission, Jack had confronted Hammond with his questions about the details of the backstory of the new 2IC for his team. Specifically, if she knew so much about the Gate, then why wasn't she there when they'd first gone to Abydos? What had she been doing at the Pentagon?
Hammond had informed him that the Project Leader Dr. Katherine Langford, had not been given any choice when Carter had been transferred off the project. The Air Force had decided to shut the program down. Although Captain Carter had figured out how to get the 'Gate to power up, they hadn't figured out that the symbols created Gate addresses. They needed someone with linguistics expertise such as Daniel had with ancient languages and hieroglyphics.
And so the Air Force was closing the project down, and they were slowly dismembering Dr. Langford's research team. When they transferred Carter off the project, Katherine had become desperate because she knew that the project time could now be counted in just a few weeks or days. And so she sought out Doctor Daniel Jackson. Archeologist... and considered a general crackpot amongst his colleagues. Because he was talking about aliens. Katherine didn't know if anything that Jackson was saying was even remotely true, but she knew that there was good evidence of aliens on Earth. And the biggest piece of it was sitting inside Cheyenne Mountain.
So Carter had been sent to the Pentagon. And when the Air Force was assembling the team that would go through the gate, the bright and promising young Captain Sam Carter was not considered expendable enough to send through the 'Gate to who-knows-where. An eccentric archeologist and a suicidal retired special-forces Colonel, however, were. Expendable that is.
And so they went without her. And he was pretty sure that she was still pissed about that. He hadn't understood the young scientist aviator officer who had presented herself in that briefing room oh-so-many years ago. But he knew her now. And she'd been right. He had come to like her as he'd gotten to know her.
She didn't consider herself so special as to be less expendable than those around her. And she had a burning drive to explore. She'd wanted to go through the 'Gate... just to find out what was on the other side.
That's why she'd joined the Air Force in the first place. Not to follow in her father's footsteps... not to carry on a family tradition... No, she originally joined the Air Force with the ultimate goal of NASA and flying space shuttles and maybe walking on the Moon or Mars.
And that led him to the one question about her history that he still didn't know the answer to. Not even today, more than eight years after that initial meeting. What had derailed her from the 'astronaut track' to work on that ancient metal ring?
Hammond wouldn't give him the details. Nor would Carter. As the years had passed and his confidence and admiration of the scientist officer had grown, he'd gone back to her personnel file looking for that answer. But he didn't find it. She'd been flying jets in the Gulf War, and then there was a notation of a Classified mission, and then she was transferred out of the active pilot's rotation and back to the States, where she was assigned to a minor Air Force research facility.
And that's where Katherine Langford had found her. Chomping at the bit to do anything more exciting. Even work with an ancient metal ring.
"Jack?"
"Hmmm...Wha-?" he shook his head out of the past and back to the present. He'd drifted off into thought during their banter about deleting Mondays, and she was now finished with calibrating his watch for their local day and week.
"It's all set," she held his watch out for him and he took it absently.
"Um, thanks," he replied as she turned her attention to something on one of the laptops.
His thoughts wandered again... if they actually ended up spending years alone together on this planet... he wondered if she would ever tell him what had actually derailed her original 'astronaut plans'.
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TBC
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