Chapter 9 – No Rest for the Weary
Hoffman ran to the 'Gate Room before Dagón could announce that it really was GC-1 coming through. He ran up the ramp as they helped Dude through.
"How is he?" Joseph demanded as they rushed Rick to the hospital room.
"I'm back to normal, dude," Rick surprisingly answered in a small voice; he sounded weak and stressed, but grateful. "I don't have to fight to gain control. They're gone."
"Thank God for that!" Hoffman said and they got him to Dr. Fields to check him over.
"Sir?" Captain Rick's voice was weak after an hour of the tests.
"I'm right here, son," Joseph said, coming to stand next to the bed.
"I want you to promise me something," Dude said sleepily as the morphine for his body aches began to work.
"Yes, son?"
"Never, I repeat, never send me off-world on a mission again, please, sir…"
Hoffman smiled. "Dude, that's something that I can and will do. From now on, you're the computer expert and Spacegate dialer who never sets foot off world again—except for other things that doesn't involve a mission."
"Yes, dude. Thank you, sir!" Dude said and fell asleep.
Daniel went to bed late at night, exhausted from the adventure and the near fatal race against time. He was also tired from sitting at his desk reading journals that had been found, dating back to a time before the Dark Ages. The author was a wise man named Doctor Daniel Jackson, and they were fascinating albeit all out of order—the journals had been separated into sections where each journey through the Stargate was separate, and then all mixed up. But the thing that had captivated Daniel the most was that even though the man's name was the same as his, the team he talked about, SG-1, seemed very similar to GC-1…and they had just gone through a similar ordeal that Dude had just went though. Daniel Jackson, the author himself, had had numerous people inside his head, using him as a sort of lifeboat. It was resolved differently, but it was so similar, Matthewson had to finish the entry.
Looking at the clock in his room, he saw that it was around one in the morning. Seeing the time made him feel even more tired than he had before. He bookmarked and closed the journal carefully. Not even bothering to change from his combat clothes, he took his glasses off and flopped onto his bed, asleep the minute he got comfortable.
"Daniel! Get up! We need to go off world again!" John's voice woke the linguist from a sound sleep.
Moaning, Daniel lifted his head off of his bed. "What is it? Where are we going?"
"If you'd allow us to enter, I'll explain."
Stumbling out of bed, he put his glasses on and raked his hair somewhat into order. He then opened the door.
Outside stood equally disheveled Alex and John, and Dagón, who looked to be the only wide-awake one in the group.
"Come in," Daniel said, gesturing into his room. Allowing John to sit on the only chair he had in his room, he and Alex sat on Daniel's bed, facing the chair. Dagón stood behind John, seemingly alert for anything.
"Well, Hoffman says that they've sent out a probe to a new world that they wanted us to explore and they found a strange reading. It seems like it's a power source of some kind, and so Hoffman wants us to go out and collect it."
"So it's an easy in, out, and get on with life mission?" Daniel didn't have a good feeling about this. He wasn't fully used to how the life on the SS Karma worked, but it was growing on him.
"So it would seem, but we all know how they go!" John said grimly. "We leave in two minutes. Let's get to the 'Gate Room."
Yawning, Daniel nodded and pulled his combat boots on. Glancing over at his clock, he saw that it was five in the morning. He had gotten four hours of sleep. Sighing and yawning again, Daniel got to the Spacegate room.
"You're going to P38-451," General Hoffman said over the intercom, looking down at them from the Control Room. "Good luck!"
"Dude, we're going to need the radiation combat pack," Colonel O'Brien said over his comm. "We don't know what this source will do, so we might as well be safe."
"Right, man. Programming it now. Have a radical time there, dudes!"
The Spacegate swirled outward and established a connection to the other side.
"Thanks Dude; we will!" The four entered the Spacegate.
From the swirling stars and planets, they exited the Spacegate dressed in radiation suits, which were somewhat like astronaut suits—with an oxygen pack and breathing gear on their back. They also had heavy boots on. Strapped around their bodies, they had holsters with many guns and in their ears were their comms.
"Good morning, campers!" John said over his comm as they walked down the steps of the alien Spacegate inside a building. They were inside of a building. "It's a beautiful day here on P38-451 with a balmy…um, room temperature. Please try not to attract too much attention to ourselves and keep your hands and feet away from the outside of the ride, and please, have a good time!"
The entire crew smiled.
"Enough gear?" Daniel asked later as they waited for Alex to get her scanner out.
"Yeah, but you can never be too careful. We don't know what this source is…maybe radiation," the Colonel said back. Both men glanced back at the struggling Major, though something off to her right caught his eye.
"John," Daniel said as he walked towards it, "what is this?"
The object was a round pedestal with six black squares down the middle of it. In the center of the squares was half of a transparent black orb, with three black squares over it, and three under it. On the sides of these squares, in half circles, were all of the symbols of the Spacegate.
Daniel had never seen anything like it in his entire life.
"That, Daniel, is what we call the Dial-Out Computer, or DOC for short. With that, you can go to any planet that has a Spacegate on it, as long as you know your point of origin symbol and the sequence for the other one. You know the one for the Karma, right?"
"Yeah," Daniel said.
"I'll show ya how to dial back when we leave. Right now, Alex found her scanner. Let's go!" They began to walk towards the way Alexandra pointed.
"What kind of radiation is there, Alex?" the Colonel asked a little while later.
"Well, sir, it could be Alpha, Omega or Gamma, but we're not really sure if it actually is radioactive. I mean, the laws of physics could be totally different here, and that the gravitational pull, the mass and other things could be contorted from as we know it."
Looking over at him, Alex saw the Colonel's blank face.
"English, Major?"
"Well, sir," Alex said, a bit frustrated that he wasn't getting her, "there is a type of radiation here, but my sensor hasn't been on enough to pick up on which one. I'm saying that also the way in which gravity and mass work here could be different than Tierra's or Earth's, and so this radiation might not be deadly."
"Radiation? Not deadly?" The Colonel sounded confused. "I thought that was all that radiation was…"
"Sink me! But what else could the reading be, me hearty?" Dagón was confused, as well. "Could there be a wee bit o' chance that the readin' ain't radiation?"
"Well, it could just be a sort of heat signature," Alex said. "Heat gives of a weak sort of radiation."
"Aye, but Dude and I ran some infrared scanners on the planet and there weren't any signs of life."
"Yes, but the source doesn't need to be alive to give off heat! Take a—"
"Hey, hey, hey! Let's just find it first, children. Then we can hold a debate over it!"
"Yes, sir," Alex said and they continued on their way, forgetting their argument.
Walking for a while, the Major stopped suddenly. Pointing her small tracking device at a spot to their right, she said, "Sir, over here! The reading is picking something up."
"All right, everyone! Take the best precautions you can. The thing in there could be anything, so we need to treat it as a threat. Dagón, Matthewson, draw your weapons. Croft, keep me posted."
"Yes, sir," Alex said and walked in after them, keeping back just in case there was some gunfire. Nothing happened.
"Nothing here!" Daniel said over his comm from the room he had secured.
"Same here, m'hearty!" Dagón called from the room attached to the entrance.
"There's no one here," the Colonel said, "but I think I've found the device!"
The rest of the GC-1 crew joined their Colonel in the other room. Standing there, they looked at what John had found: a gold pyramid-shaped device on a raised dais.
Putting her scanner up to it, Alex said, "It doesn't appear to be dangerous, sir. There's no bad radiation coming from it…but it is the source the scanner's picking up."
"All right, campers," the Colonel said, "let's take her back to camp."
"Yes, sir," Alex said and produced a heavy-duty box from Dagón's pack. Placing the object gently into the box, they closed it and left the room.
John and Daniel headed back towards the Spacegate and the DOC first, leaving Dagón to guard Alex and their burden.
"All right, Daniel," the Colonel said with a slight smirk, "we're going to learn the ABCs of dialing on a DOC. First of all, A—Always make sure that you actually know where you want to go, and that you know the address to get there. Secondly, B—Be sure that you press your jewel before entering the Spacegate; if you don't, you'll be the first thud they see and hear on the iris. And finally, C—Constantly know the new point of origin symbol for each planet; with out that, you can't go anywhere."
"All right," Daniel said, a smile on his face. "But how do I dial in?"
"Okay." The Colonel took a deep breath, and then looked at Daniel. "It's very hard."
Daniel raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "Really?"
John nodded. "Yes."
"Okay…"
John got even more serious than before. "All right, this is what you do. The first one you dial is the Earth's symbol of origin, which is Ħ. Push that one."
Daniel did as the Colonel told him to, and the inner circle of the Spacegate spun around so that the Ħ symbol was at the very top and center. The blue beam scanned it in, and the symbol appeared golden on the half of transparent black orb in the middle of the DOC. The symbol on the Spacegate, as well, after being scanned, stayed red on the Spacegate; and the button symbol on the DOC turned an aqua color, just like the water.
"Whoa," Daniel said.
"Yeah," the Colonel said. "And you know the rest of them for The Karma?"
"Of course," Daniel said, and put them in, in order: Φ § Џ Ψ ф ¥. On the other six black squares appeared the other golden symbols, the second one in the sequence appearing at the top, and the rest following suit down the line—they each stayed red, as well, on the Spacegate, and aqua on the DOC.
"Now comes the hardest part," John said, a very solemn expression on his face. "You need to put your hand on the middle orb and push down."
Daniel did so. The Spacegate made a connection to the other one and the aqua water appeared.
"Very good on your first try. That was really hard."
"Oh, yes," Daniel replied, a serious expression on his face. "It was very hard."
After Daniel pressed his jewel, the team left the world to return to their home. Daniel and John smiled all the way back.