Chapter 7: What Happened?

Buffy had just gone to bed when she felt it. Something had happened to Dawn. She didn't know how she knew it, but she did. She sat back up on the side of her bed, and picked up her phone. She dialled Dawn's home number, and got her answering machine. She thought about the time difference, and dialled the number she had for Dawn at work. She listened to the message saying that Dawn would be out of her office for a few days, and giving the extension numbers for people to talk to, if the matter was important.

Buffy cut off the message, and dialled Willow.

"What do you mean, 'she just vanished!'?" asked General O'Neill. SG-2 was back from P5C-4562 way ahead of schedule. They had nearly set a new record for the quickest turn around time in SGC history.

"She just vanished, Jack!" said Colonel Carter. "I stepped through the gate right after her, and she wasn't there! She was gone when I got to the other side!"

"What happened to her?"

"I don't know!" said Sam. "She just vanished!"

"Could this be like what happened when Teal'c got trapped in the gate?"

"No," said Sam. "I was right behind her. I entered the gate after she did, and I still arrived on P5C-4562. She vanished somewhere between the demolecularization entering the gate's event horizon, and the remolecularization on the other side. And look at this!" She pointed to the pile of clothing, the pack, and other things on the conference room table. "She disappeared right out of her clothes!" She picked up the sword. She had kidded Dawn over the way she had insisted on taking it. "Her second best sword is still here! It's impossible! And I'm the one who pushed her!"

"You can't blame yourself for this Colonel!"

"I pushed her into the gate, Sir, and she's gone!"

"She had already started to take that step herself, Colonel. You just hurried her along a bit. Whatever happened had nothing to do with you pushing her."

General O'Neill looked around his conference table at the end of the week. Several unhappy faces looked back at him. "Okay, what do we know?"

"There was a massive power surge in the gate when Dr. Summers entered it," said Colonel Carter. "The Alpha Site's gate registered a power surge at the same time. We've contacted the Tok'ra, and the Asgard, to see if they noticed anything, and they both reported similar surges. As far as we can tell, every Stargate recorded a power surge at the moment that Dawn Summers entered ours."

"Does anyone have any idea what could have happened to her?" asked Jack.

"Everyone we've talked to tells us that this is totally unprecedented," said Carter. "The Tok'ra, the Asgard, even the Nox."

"The Nox talked to us?" asked Jack.

"The Asgard talked to the Nox, and relayed their reply back to us," said Daniel. "They seem to be just as anxious to get an answer as to how this could happen as we are."

"And whatever caused that power surge seems to have done something else to the gate network," said Carter. "DHDs have been malfunctioning, sporadically, ever since it happened."

"Has anyone else disappeared?" asked Daniel.

"No, nothing like that," said Carter. "It's just that gates don't connect sometimes when you dial. Punch in the address, and nothing happens."

"Have we lost contact with any worlds?" asked Teal'c.

"None," said Carter. "Whatever the problem is, seems to be intermittent. Dial the same address again, and the gates connect just fine. It seems that all the DHDs capacity is being taken up by something else, but whatever it is shuts down for a while, if someone tries to use a DHD, and it fails. There haven't been any reports of permanent malfunctions."

"Of course, if their DHD stopped working altogether, then they might have trouble reporting that it wasn't working, now wouldn't they?" asked Jack.

"A lot of worlds have the means to communicate, independent of their gates, Sir," said Carter. "We've even got our own small fleet of interstellar capable ships now. And no one seems to have dropped out of touch."

"How about our Dialling Computer?" asked Jack.

"It seems to be just fine," said Carter. "Whatever is affecting the DHDs doesn't seem to be affecting it." Jack thought that she sounded rather proud of that. The original kludge that had been the Dialling Computer had been upgraded so many times over the years that Sam now boasted that it worked better than a DHD. Every problem that they'd had with it in the early years, where they got into trouble because the DC did something that a DHD wouldn't, had been a learning experience. The current DC was just as fast, and had a similar computing capacity to a DHD, but it gave them much finer control over the gate. They could still push the envelope in ways that a DHD didn't allow, only now they had a much better idea of what was happening when they did so.

They seemed to be getting off topic though, so Jack decided to pull them back onto it. "Why Summers?" he asked. "Why did she disappear? What's so special about her?" He looked at Dr. Ramsey, the Chief Medical Officer. "Is there anything in her medical report? Anything unusual about her DNA?"

"We didn't really notice it before we took a closer look, but there is nothing unusual about Dr. Summers' DNA," said Dr. Ramsey.

"What do you mean?" asked Jack.

"Well, normally, when we look at someone's DNA, we look for the anomalies," said Dr. Ramsey. "Even if they're perfectly healthy, everyone has a few minor defects, and is carrying some undesirable recessive genes, whether it's for something dangerous, like Cystic Fibrosis, or something more benign, like colour blindness."

"Yeah, so?" asked Jack.

"Dawn Summers' DNA doesn't seem to have anything wrong with it," said Dr. Ramsey.

"And that's unusual?" asked Jack.

"It's unheard of," said Dr. Ramsey. "We haven't been able to identify a single defect, and she isn't carrying a single recessive gene that has been linked to any known illness."

"And you didn't notice this before?" asked Jack.

"Our software only flags defects that will affect the particular individual," said Dr. Ramsey. "Recessive genes only affect their offspring, if they happen to match up with the same recessive in their partner. The software flags us if it notices a defect that will manifest as a real health problem, or a major recessive, like being a carrier for Cystic Fibrosis, just so we can let them know, but it doesn't flag the minor stuff. But there seems to be nothing wrong with her DNA."

"So what's this got to do with her vanishing?"

"Maybe nothing, but it is an anomaly. The odds against something like that happening naturally, are, well, astronomical."

"We speculated that Buffy Summers, and her friend Willow Rosenberg, might be hok'taur," said Teal'c. "Perhaps Dawn Summers is a hok'taur as well."

"Willow said something about Dawn having a lot of power, when she was doing her thing, back on that island," said Sam.

"Maybe she's a clone, or something," said Daniel.

"Her being from Sunnydale does bother me a bit," said Captain Lewis, the base security officer. "Ever since the city was destroyed, it's been a favourite place for people with fake IDs to be from. Lots of records were lost, making it difficult to determine if something has been forged."

"But we have her early school records, from when she lived in Los Angeles, and we first met her when she was seventeen," said Daniel. "And her sister ran afoul of the NID when Dawn was thirteen, so people have been keeping a close watch on her for over ten years now."

"Her really early records are a bit sparse," said Captain Lewis. "That's consistent with a manufactured identity. If it's a fake, though, whoever did it, did a first rate job."

"You did the standard interviews with relatives, and such, when she was getting her clearance, didn't you?" asked Jack.

"Yes," said Captain Lewis. "Someone talked to her father, though she seems to have been somewhat estranged from him since she was fourteen. She also has some aunts, uncles and cousins that we talked to."

"So I really doubt if she's got a manufactured ID," said Jack. "Anything else?"

"Do we have any DNA from her relatives?" asked Dr. Ramsey. "Give us something to compare to. If she was cloned, it could show."

"For crying out loud!" said Jack. "How could she be a clone?"

"Asked the man whose clone won the Conn Smythe trophy last year," said Daniel.

"This is getting us nowhere," said Jack. "Even if she is a clone, it doesn't explain why she just up and disappeared into the gate. If clones disappeared, the Asgard would be vanishing all over the place!"

"Could she have gone someplace else?" asked Daniel "There was that time that the gate took a hit as we were entering it, and you and Sam got sent to Antarctica. Could that be what that energy surge was? Could the wormhole have jumped for a moment?"

"I doubt it," said Sam. "Not without sending her clothes there too. And I was touching her as we entered the gate. If the gate had jumped, I should have gone to the same place she did."

"Does anyone have any idea about what happened to Dr. Summers, or how to get her back?" asked Jack. He looked around the table, and saw nothing but unhappy faces, and people shaking their heads.

"I was afraid of that." Jack looked at his watch. "It's getting late, people, and I know that it's been a week since some of you got a full night's sleep. I want all of you to go home. If any of you are still here in half an hour, I'll have the SFs see you out. And they won't let any of you back in until 0800 tomorrow morning. Dismissed!"

Everyone got up to go. Sam, Daniel and Teal'c followed Jack into his office. "You need to get some sleep too, Jack," said Sam.

"I'm going to, Sam." Jack rubbed his face. "But first I have to inform Dawn's sister that she's gone, and I don't have any idea what happened to her."

"It's three AM in England, Jack," said Daniel. "I think you should wait until morning."

"Daniel Jackson is correct, General O'Neill," said Teal'c. "You have been sleeping less than anyone else, since this happened. You need your rest as well."

Jack let his friends gently push him out of his office, and toward the elevator. Sam grabbed his uniform hat, and jacket as she left. She gave him the jacket as they waited for the elevator. "God, why did I ever let them talk me into this?" asked Jack, as he put it on. "The paperwork involved in this job is bad enough, but I'm the one who has to talk to the relatives of everyone who goes through that gate, and doesn't come home again."

"I'd rather have you in the job, than some Pentagon desk-jockey who doesn't care about anything other than making sure that all the right forms are filled out in triplicate," said Daniel. "In the long run, it makes for a lot fewer relatives who need to be told some lie about how their loved ones died."

Jack took his cap from Sam. "You know, I don't think Buffy will believe any of the lies."

It was nearly ten when Jack arrived home. One nice thing about being a general: he could requisition a driver for those nights when he was too tired to drive himself. He got out of the car, and told the driver to have someone pick him up next morning at 0700. He walked up to the front door of his darkened house. He was so tired that he let himself limp a bit: his left knee was aching badly.

He let himself into the house, and hung his uniform cap on a hook by the door. Something else he didn't like about being a general: no wandering in and out of the base in his nice, comfortable, beat-up, old leather jacket. He had to wear the uniform pretty much all the time. He'd been able to get away with wearing his BDU most of the time while he was only a brigadier general, but that bit of comfort had vanished when he got the second star. He flipped the switch for the front hall light as he unbuttoned his uniform jacket. Nothing happened. It didn't really bother him; he figured it was just a burnt out bulb, and he didn't need a light to navigate his front hall. He turned toward the control pad for his alarm, to deactivate it. He saw that the alarm wasn't on. That did bother him. He started to reach into his jacket for the gun that he always carried when off the base.

Someone grabbed him, and slammed his back up against the wall. He could feel one hand gripped around his neck, holding him pinned there, with his feet off the floor. A second hand was gripping the hand that he had been reaching for his gun with. The hand on his throat wasn't quite crushing his windpipe. He could barely breathe. He grabbed its wrist with his left hand, to try to pull it away, but he couldn't make it budge. Whoever it was, was too strong.

"What happened to my sister, Jack?" asked Buffy.