Chapter 11 – Drinks
Reluctant to move from her chair as she felt the adrenaline leaving her body, the enormity of what had happened and what it meant hit her.
SG1 was here.
She had a way home.
Jack wasn't dead.
None of them were, they were here, with her, alive and well.
She was so lost in her own thoughts thinking about it that when she heard and felt someone enter the cockpit, she automatically reached for her blaster…only to find out that it wasn't there.
"Whoa there, Carter, it's only me." Sam's heart was pounding in her ears and she shook her head to clear the paranoia there.
"Sorry, you made me jump." She turned to Teal'c and he raised an eyebrow."You wish to have your weapon returned to you?"
Sam smiled. "Please. It's my favourite gun." She grinned.
"Yeah, well I don't suppose you need them when you have…glowing swords." Sam grinned at Jack's words, unknowingly echoing those she had said all that time ago. Slipping the blaster into her holster and clipping on the safety, she raised an eyebrow at them. She could feel the questions buzzing around in their minds.
"I know you've got a lot of question, trust me, so have I, but right now, I've been AWOL for about 9 months and Corran's gonna kill me. Slowly." She turned to the Wookie beside her. "'Tralla, where did you-" She was cut off by Dentralla's reply as the biped guessed what Sam had been going to ask.
Beckoning to the three men, she led them out of the cockpit.
Jack followed Sam out of the cockpit, now thoroughly confused. A moment later, he had one of his questions answered when they entered the quarters where the tall furry alien had strapped Sorrell's body to a bunk.
His expression immediately sobered from the silly grin he'd been wearing to a sombre, grief driven one, echoed by Daniel and Teal'c.
"Wait here." Jack nodded at Sam, watching her from the doorway as she walked in and carefully un-strapped him, picking him up with a surprising ease and carefully carrying him out.
Jack subconsciously added her strength to the list of strange things she had done, to ask her about later.
One look at her face told him that she was angry about what had happened, though he could see that she restrained it and controlled it.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly to the three men.
"Not your fault," Daniel told her.
Sam looked away and led them silently to the hatch, hitting a button and walking down the ramp when it had descended.
As soon as they were out, a harried-looking man jogged over, pushing a hovering gurney, which Sam put Sorrell on.
The medic looked up at Sam. "Not NR?"
"No, but that doesn't mean any less respect," she told him firmly.
"Yes Ma'am." Moving to the keypad on the side of the gurney, he hit a few keys before asking, "Name?" Sam looked over at him and he replied quietly.
"Sorrell, Lieutenant Jeff Sorrell."
Inputting the data, the medic silently led the gurney away, putting it with two of the other bodies, soldiers who had been injured in the firefight and had died on the way over.
Jack watched Sam scan the crowd before apparently seeing whoever it was she was looking for and walking over to meet them.
He watched her go for a few seconds. Dressed in black boots that stopped just below the knee, tight black pants, and a blue jacket with a hood-type thing, he was suddenly aware of how much they stood out, wearing their green fatigues and holding acutely less advanced weapons.
Hearing a grumble behind him, he turned to see the tall, furry alien behind him, making an unmistakable shooing gesture at him.
Turning back to Daniel and Teal'c, he raised an eyebrow at them.
"Shall we?"
"Indeed."
They arrived at the group just in time to hear the reply to Sam's question of 'what happened?'
"Shortly after we landed, a few ships came out of hyperspace and started pounding on the Errant Venture. They were doing fine until that dreadnaught appeared, along with a lot of uglies, and – I don't know if you noticed – a lot of TIE fighters. Whoever was running that operation down there has Imperial backup."
"I thought we had a truce with the Imps?" Sam asked, frowning.
"We do; we think that it might be one of the renegade warlords that ran when Pellaeon made peace with the NR."
At this point Jack looked at Daniel and Teal'c, who both shrugged, neither of them having a clue what was happening.
"So, Sam, care to introduce us to your friends?" asked the shorter of the two men, the one with the goatee. The taller man had sandy hair and had weaved his arm round the waist of the red-haired woman beside him. Sam grimaced and sighed.
"Right. Guys, this is Jedi Knight Corran Horn, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, and Jedi Knight Mara Jade-Skywalker. This is Colonel Jack O'Neill, Doctor Daniel Jackson and Teal'c. They're the rest of the team I was a part of on my home planet."
Jack didn't miss the surprise on the faces of the three Jedi – whatever that was – when Sam said where she knew them from.
What surprised him was the slight feeling of pain that he felt at the thought that Sam hadn't told anyone about her team, her family. He immediately banished the thought, thinking that he probably would have done the same, knowing that it would just have caused pain.
"How did they get to be in the middle of a slave trading facility on some planet on the edge of known space?" The red-head introduced as Mara Jade-Skywalker questioned, appraising them with an experienced eye.
"Yeah, that's not really something that we want to discuss here," Sam told them cryptically.
"Of course not," Corran replied dryly, shooting Sam an indecipherable look.
"Where are we heading?" Sam asked with a sigh.
"Coruscant. We'll drop off the troops and then Booster's taking us to Yavin. He's been complaining that he doesn't get to see his family enough." Sam didn't miss the worry in her three friends as it escalated at the realisation that they wouldn't be going near the 'gate any time soon.
She shot them an apologetic look, resisting the urge to smile at their surprise at her apparent clairvoyance.
Corran, Luke, and Mara sensed this too, wondering why they would want to go back to Telk's planet when they could just fly to their planet whenever they wanted.
"Why don't we…take this discussion somewhere more comfortable?" Luke asked them calmly, gesturing deeper into the ship.
"Sure, why not," Jack replied in a blasé tone, gesticulating with his left arm, trying to hide his confusion and curiosity and fear at being stuck in another galaxy, not knowing that he was broadcasting those very feelings to the Force users.
Neither Jack, Daniel, or even Teal'c could keep the huge grins from their faces at the seeming 'resurrection' of the friend they thought dead, despite being faced with the death of Sorrell and their strange situation. A large part of that was wonder at seeing the inside of the huge ship, especially when they stepped into the turbo lift and travelled up several levels at high speed.
As they walked along the corridors, Sam wished she could have been privy to the telepathic almost-conversation that she knew would be going on, but she knew that she had lost the right to listen in when she had gone AWOL, although she would have been unable to comment either way. For all her skills at telekinesis and energy absorption, she could not for the life of her do Force projection of that kind, much the same as Corran couldn't affect things through telekinesis.
When they arrived at their destination, Sam couldn't help but smirk. Figures, she thought.
Usually a floating entertainment barge like Las Vegas in space for smugglers, the large room would usually have been bustling with various denizens of the galaxy, ranging from those that had nothing but the shirt on their backs to those that could pay someone just to carry the shirt on their backs.
They now stood in one of the deserted, upper-class sabbacc rooms, fully equipped with a bar.
The others seated themselves around a sabbacc table, Daniel staring around in wonder and muttering something about cultural aspects. Teal'c stoically regarded the three Jedi. And Jack…fiddled with the disruptor field in the middle of the table, peering at it curiously while Sam vaulted over the bar and collected drinks.
The three new humans were still wary of Dentralla, and the Jedi made sure that none of them sat next to her.
Knowing that Corran, Dentralla, Luke and Mara would have the usual, it took Sam only a second to decide what she would get the others, and within a few minutes, she was back at the table, placing the drinks in front of them.
She gave Daniel the same as Luke, Jack the same as herself, Corran and Mara, Teal'c a blue Milk and Dentralla a Honey Ale.
"What is it?" Daniel asked, eying the dark brown fluid, steaming slightly apprehensively.
"It's an exotic cocktail, a favourite of Master Skywalker. You'll like it!" she told him with a smirk as he hesitantly took a sip. His face contorted in surprise.
"Its hot chocolate!" he exclaimed.
"Exotic cocktail?" Jack asked, his eyebrows creeping into his hairline. "And this drink, which looks like beer is beer?" he asked hopefully.
"Correllian Ale," she told him, taking a mouthful of her own.
"Not bad," he said, glugging down a mouthful.
"Best you can get," Corran told him, proudly smiling.
"MajorCarter, I know of no earth equivalent that is blue," Teal'c informed her. She unwilling flinched when he said 'Major' but answered as if she hadn't.
"Its blue milk." Teal'c nodded and took a sip before giving his approval.
"So, if you don't mind," Corran began, directing his comment at the three members of SG-1, "I think we need to know where Sam has been for the last 10 months." At this he turned to look pointedly at the blonde next to him.
"It was only 9 and a half," she grumbled quietly before taking a deep breath and continuing. "Well, right after you left for Luke and Mara's wedding, we received the distress signal and Kam sent Tekli and I to the planet." The three Jedi nodded, knowing this all ready. "Well, the virus there is one that I know…I've had it; the Touched Virus," she supplied for her three ex team-mates.
"Didn't we…you know, kill that?" Jack asked, his confusion evident.
"That's what I thought, but, the people who took me could well have stayed on the dark side of the planet, and Tuplo's people would never have known. I mean, we wouldn't have seen them if they hadn't been going in after Milosha."
"Right."
"Well, after getting all the records I could of when and where it was first seen on the planet, I was able to extrapolate a likely carrier for it. By using the in-bound vector it came in on, I was able to compare it to reports of any strange illnesses on planets along that vector. From each of those, I could jump back to the next one in the line. I left data for cures on each of the planets that hadn't figured it out for themselves, and eventually, I managed to find my way back to the planet that I was first taken to." Sam was interrupted by a barked comment from Dentralla.
"No, I am not telling them that." Dentralla protested at great length and Sam sighed in annoyance, shooting the Wookie a glare to kill. "No."
"You can understand what she's saying?" Daniel asked her, receiving a nod. "Incredible."
"No more so than someone who can speak 23 languages, several of them dead," she replied dryly.
"Actually its 24 now," Jack told her, grinning at the blushing archaeologist.
"It is?"
"Yeah, he now speaks Asgard…ian." Sam grinned.
"What, did you get Thor to teach you?"
"No, actually Jack did." Jack glared at Daniel.
"Jack!"
"Yeah, Thor taught him when we got stuck on the Prometheus with Thor." They were interrupted by an irritated roar from Dentralla.
"NO!" Sam told her firmly before continuing. "We went 'undercover' as mercs – mercenaries – " she added at three puzzled stares. "and got all the info that we could, but we were found out after about 2 weeks and had to do a runner."
"That's when you sent us the message?" Luke asked for clarification.
"Yes. I'm sorry; I didn't know they were allied with an Imp Warlord."
"Hey, it's not your fault, and you did more than enough to save the soldiers down there." Corran told her softly. "And you got your friends out of there." He added, putting a hand on her shoulder. Sam looked away, remembering how close she had come to falling.
Sensing the turmoil in her, Corran got to his feet and, shooting a look at Luke, grabbed Sam by the hand, wrapping an arm around her took her into another room to talk to her.
Luke and Mara, sensing the need for Sam's three friends to talk, alone, headed off to the other side of the room with Dentralla and their drinks.
"We'll leave you to talk for awhile," Luke told them, giving them a brief smile.
Jack watched them go before turning back to look at his friends.
"Anyone else finding it just a little creepy that they always seem to know what we're thinking?" he asked the other two.
"What… oh, no. I was just thinking about what happened on the planet, and how it happened."
"It seemed as if MajorCarter was controlling things around her," Teal'c said, a slight frown crossing his face.
"It couldn't be like the thing that happened with Nirrti could it?"
"What thing with Nirrti?" Daniel asked, confused.
"Uh, it happened while you were…ascended. Nirrti tried to make Swiss cheese of everyone's DNA, she nearly killed Sam, but she had these…servants that could you know, wave their arms and make stuff move by telekennetheth…is." Daniel rolled his eyes, knowing full well that Jack knew the word.
"Telekinesis. They also had some telepathic abilities," Teal'c supplied for him.
"Yeah, that. But these guys were all…deformed because of it." They lapsed into silence, contemplating what it could be.
"Looks like she landed on her feet though," Jack finally said, vocalising the relief that they all felt at knowing that she was neither dead, nor suffering as part of some Goa'uld's harem. And it looks like she got herself a boyfriend, Jack added bitterly to himself, an odd sense of disappointment and pain in the pit of his stomach, which he carefully shielded from anyone seeing. His suspicions after seeing the two hug on the planet had just been confirmed by the intimacy that he had shown when he lead her to the other room. Once again, they lapsed into silent ruminations.
When Corran pulled her up by the hand, Sam didn't protest, knowing that she had to talk about it and get it sorted, though she didn't relish the thought. She also knew that Corran wasn't going to take 'no' for an answer right now.
"What is it, Sam?" he asked her when they reached the safety of the next room.
She was silent for a while before finally speaking in a small, soft voice.
"I almost fell to the Dark Side, Corran."
"But you didn't. You pulled back in time."
"You don't understand," she told him, her voice steely.
"Don't I?" Corran replied, frustrated by her unwillingness to listen. "You think you're the only one who's been tempted by the Dark Side? I have, Luke has, hell, Mara worked for the Dark Side."
"No, you don't!" she yelled, whirling to face him and looking directly at him. "I stood there, and I was willing to suck his life out of him, kill him by taking the very energy he needed to survive from his cells! I wanted to kill him. I thought he deserved to die for taking me from my friends, from my home, and for then trying to kill them! I had that power and I wanted to kill him with it!"
Sam was on the verge of tears, something that he had never seen before, as she looked away.
"That's what the Dark Side does to you Sam, it corrupts you."
"That's just it. I've felt like this before. Long before I used the Force," she told him, quiet once again. "I had a device on, and I knew that this Goa'uld would kill me and my friends if I didn't use it, so I did. And I felt mighty." She looked back at him, a stark fear shining in her eyes. "That device was controlled by will power."
Corran stared at her for a moment before engulfing her in a huge hug.
"How do you know it wasn't the Force?" he asked her quietly, his words muffled by her hair.
"What?"
"You say it's controlled by will power. How can that work? Do you know it's not the Force?" Sam looked up at him.
"I don't know. We don't know how it works, really, just that it does…" Corran couldn't help but notice that her eyes lit up as she started rattling theories off, explaining things that he didn't understand, races he had never heard of and wars that he would have thought hard to miss, but he had nevertheless.
After a while Sam slowed to a stop.
"Sorry. I got carried away there. And you probably don't understand a thing I'm talking about." Grabbing his arm and looping hers through it in a display of affection that took him by surprise, she dragged him back out of the room. "You'll understand in a while," she told him cryptically, her bright mood returned as quickly as it had left at the realisation that she wasn't evil deep down.
That, coupled with an excitement over new theories fuelled a bright smile as they entered the room, rejoining SG-1 at the table, shortly followed by the Skywalkers and Dentralla.
"So, we got into the facility, ran around for awhile and then we come to a room with this great big, circle thing in it that starts to spin. Then a jet of water spurts out of it before it forms a puddle – standing vertically, don't forget – then these three step out, with a friend," Corran continued, explaining what had happened to Luke and Mara, eager to get some explanations that he just knew Sam had.
"Stargate," she told him.
"What?"
"The big circle is a Stargate, and the puddle is the event horizon of a wormhole." Corran thought she was joking at first, but he soon realised that she was deadly serious.
"Where does it go?" Mara asked immediately.
"Lots of places. As far as I can tell, there is only one in this galaxy," she told them, waiting for their reaction. Everyone in this galaxy knew that you couldn't travel to other galaxies.
They stared at her, dumbfounded.
"By the way, I come from another galaxy," she said with a grin. She could see Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c exchanging glances, sensing that they were wondering why she hadn't told them this before and why this was such a big deal.
"But, you can't travel to other galaxies," Luke said slowly, frowning slightly. She sensed understanding dawn on SG-1's faces.
"Ah, but you can. In a matter of seconds," Jack added, catching on to what was happening.
"That's why you couldn't find your planet," Luke said, realisation dawning.
"Yeah, strange that," she said, still grinning.
"How?"
"The 'gate network spans thousands of planets, connecting them by wormhole, through which matter is broken down, travels through, and re-integrated at the other end."
"But you're human," Corran finally commented.
"Yeah, uh Daniel…" She looked to the anthropologist to explain about the scattering of humans, everyone adding their own two cents to explain about it all, including the Goa'uld, the ancients…everything to them.
They had finally finished explaining it to them and, now on her third Ale, Sam sat back in her chair.
"Any questions?" she asked, taking a mouthful of the cool drink.
"Why didn't you tell us before?" Mara asked bluntly, making Sam choke on her drink. She shrugged.
"After four years of slavery, living on the Smugglers Moon, I thought that all people in this galaxy were cheats, smugglers, slave traders…generally not people that I wanted to let loose on my home," she explained sombrely.
"And after that?" Corran prompted.
"I didn't want anyone who fell to the dark side to get a hold of something so powerful," she explained.
"We wouldn't have let that happen," Luke told her, sounding more than a little hurt.
"I know that!" She hesitated, trying to explain it, to put it into words. To her surprise, it was Jack that did it for her.
"But after years of paranoia, it's hard to let go." She turned to look at him, seeing his feelings mirrored in Daniel and Teal'c. "God, I'm sorry Sam," he said, having just realised that she wasn't always here, with friends. Daniel and Teal'c echoed him.
"It's not your fault," she told them tightly, giving them a small smile and stopping them from making any more comments when she gave an almighty yawn, looking surprised at the fact that it had crept up on her.
"Come on, I'll show you to your luxury quarters, courtesy of one Booster Terrik," Corran told them, pushing himself to his feet.
A short while later, he stopped outside a door, quickly entering a code into the door, and telling them what it was.
The door slid back, revealing a plush, inviting sitting area with two dark red couches and mahogany coloured wood furnishings. It was decorated well, especially considering that it used to be crew quarters for an Imp Star Destroyer.
"The codes for the rooms are 595. Night Sam." Jack, Daniel and Teal'c smirked at the significance of 595…where Sam had had that drink…
"Night Corran," she told him, giving him another impulsive hug and whispering "Thank you" in his ear.
She turned back into the room as he left to find all three of them standing awkwardly, Jack in particular.
"What?" she asked them, reaching out with the Force in an effort to understand.
"It is good to see you alive and well, MajorCarter," Teal'c told her, bowing slightly.
"Thanks, Teal'c you too. It's just Sam now; I'm not 'major' Carter any more." Jack looked sharply at her.
"What? Sure you've been MIA for nearly 6 years, but that doesn't mean you'll have lost your rank," he told her in surprise, not entirely understanding why she was so adamant that she wasn't anymore.
She shrugged. "Maybe. But I would have had to re-sign about 2 years ago," she told him coldly.
"So what, you just stopped being a Major 2 years ago?"
"No, I stopped being a Major when the Air Force didn't come back for me," she bit back harshly without even thinking about it, surprise registering on her face for only a brief moment.
"Hey, we tried to get you back, but we didn't even know what god-damned planet you were on!" Jack shouted back at her.
"Well maybe you didn't look hard enough!"
"Sam, we couldn't even get the long distance device to work 'til 18 months ago." Daniel's small, childlike tone cut into Sam like a knife.
"Sith! I'm sorry, I, I, I don't know. I know that you couldn't have come after me, but I guess there's this little part of me that feels betrayed because whenever you were stuck, we got you out…never leave a man behind," she told them, slumping to the floor cross-legged and putting her head in her hands.
"Ah," Jack lowered himself beside her, his knees cracking loudly, "you have every right to be angry –" Sam cursed and cut him off.
"No, I don't. I thought you were all dead, and I thought I was over this, but pain leads to fear, fear leads to anger and anger leads to the Dark Side. I should have known."
They looked at her in confusion, Jack's hand still resting lightly on her shoulder. "I was afraid that I would never see you again, afraid that you didn't really care, so I got angry." She told them with a sigh. " And anger leads to the Dark Side." The pain of her close encounter was still very close and she knew the dangers. All of a sudden, she found herself crying for the first time in who knew how long.
"Hey," Jack said softly, pulling her into a strong hug, clinging onto him as she released all of her pain, fear and anger through her tears.
Within seconds, Daniel and Teal'c had joined them in a big huddle of old friends re-united.
