Em-80 was the first one to approach the ship.
The Atlantean puddle jumper had come right through the gate, landing on the floor with a thud. There were about a dozen other people in the bunker under the mountain at the Alpha Site, and they all backed away, weapons raised. Lieutenant Wyman looked at the computer monitor and informed everyone that there was no GDO code, valid or not, coming from the ship. Not terribly helpful. If Em-80 had been in charge, she'd have had an iris installed, like they had at the SGC.
Then again, the Americans had lost their last two Alpha Sites, so maybe that wouldn't have been the best use of resources.
Em-80 had been stationed at the SGC for a year or so. It wasn't hard to tell her apart from the rest of the personnel: she had light green skin (the color of mint toothpaste), big black eyes with white pupils, and a Russian flag on the shoulder of her uniform. Back when the Russians had their own Stargate program, they had been the ones to rescue her from a lifetime spent floating in the depths of space, and as long as her adoptive homeland wanted her to cooperate with the U.S. military, that's what she'd do. Not that she was complaining - getting to mooch off the Americans while they paid for everything was too good to pass up.
"Are you sure you should be the one to check?" Sgt. Andreyev, her teammate on SG-4 , spoke to her in Russian. "You are rather important to our group. Our government asked for you specifically."
"I'm the hardest one here to kill," said Em-80. She thought that should have been obvious. Everyone knew how it went: Mathis on SG-26, then her, then Teal'c if he ever decided to come back, and finally everyone else. It was basic biology. She opened the hatch and stepped in.
"Hey," she said, addressing the two beings in the front of the ship. "How long are you gonna stay in here?"
The pilot turned around. He was a short orange catlike alien with a messy haircut - not a species Em-80 had ever seen before. As for his co-pilot, she was an ordinary human, tall, thin, dark-skinned. She wore her hair long, dyed a very bright blonde - possibly an indicator of femininity? She could have been from any number of planets. Nothing about them was that unusual. What was unusual was their ship, and their names.
"I'm Sam Dekker," the cat said. "This is my sister Ashley."
"I can see the resemblance," said Em-80.
Sam stood up, but Ashley stayed in her chair, crossing her legs over the side and turning to look at Em-80. "So," she said. "This is the Alpha Site, right?"
"Were you expecting Americans? I can get you Americans."
"I wasn't expecting a sorquine. But I'll take what I can get."
"Ah, so you know my species. Or, should I say, my current species. Very impressive. But surely you don't expect to just walk into a secure facility."
"I mean, not really," Sam admitted. "We're kind of assuming you're going to arrest us."
"And not kill us right away," Ashley added. "That was... also part of our plan."
"Hey, the plan worked!" Misam leaned against the wall. "We got arrested!"
A trip through the Stargate in a ship was one thing, but going through on foot was... well, something else entirely. (Although Ashley thought the need for an armed escort did diminish the experience a little.) What really surprised her, though, was how impressed she was by Stargate Command itself. Concrete walls, CRT monitors... this was technology from her own era. They used the same laptop computers her dad used to have for his work trips. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. For a place like this to be embedded so completely with a piece of ancient technology? It was amazing to see in person.
The inside of an underground cell was a little less interesting.
"Did you have to tell them you had a Goa'uld in your tail?"
"Hey, I told them it wasn't controlling me," Misam told her. "They were going to find out eventually; they wouldn't have trusted me if I wasn't the one to tell them. And they were gonna be suspicious of us anyway. Besides, isn't everything I said true?"
"Everything except your name."
"Sam Dekker is a normal human name."
"Maybe for a basketball player from Sheboygan, but not for an alien! And yes, I looked it up."
"When?"
Ashley crossed her arms. "It's not the first time you've used that alias, Misam."
"Oh, right. I forgot who I was talking to." Misam walked over to a bunk bed in the corner and sat down on the bottom bunk. His ears went flat against his head.
"You okay?" Ashley asked.
"Maybe I'm a little stressed. From being in the past. You know, when I was in the Earth fleet, I would have a team around me. More than just one person, I mean." He sighed. "Why'd we end up here, anyway? Why 2005? Why not 1066 or 3188 or 29?"
"I figure it has something to do with me," said Ashley. "I mean, I was born in '89, right? And it was 2007 when I got pulled into the future and I met you."
Misam nodded. "It's a couple years off, sure. But a lot of time machines won't work for jumps that short anyway. I'm just still wondering why it did anything at all."
"We better figure it out, right? How else are we going to get back?"
"Long-term stasis?" Misam leaned back. "Or maybe they could rig something up to keep me inside a wormhole, and just not reintegrate my matter for four hundred years or so. Not sure how you'd keep a gate open that long but it seems like something that would be possible."
"What about me?" Ashley asked.
"I thought you might want to stay here."
"In Colorado? Too cold, I think." Ashley looked through the small window on the cell door. "I know what you mean, though. I thought about sticking around, maybe making my way back to Paramaribo somehow once my younger self is gone. But... to be honest, I'm not sure how... open I could be about my gender. And I'm not sure I want to find out."
"We've got the test results back on the Alpha Site intruders." Dr. Lam handed a portfolio to General Landry as they walked through the halls of Stargate Command. "As far as we can tell, the alien is telling the truth, at least about his biology. The Goa'uld symbiote attached to his tail appears to be essentially brain-dead. What nervous system activity we did see in the symbiote is likely just a reflection of what's going on in his brain."
"So it can't control him?" asked Landry.
"Biologically, nothing's stopping it, but there's no distinct mind there to exert any control."
"Then why leave it in?"
"His immune system is dependent on it," Lam explained. "Even if his species had the technology to remove the symbiote, they'd still have to use something like tretonin to keep him alive. They might not have a reliable source."
"What about the human?" the general asked.
"Well, the most remarkable thing about her his her height - six foot four."
"What about the hair?"
"It's a wig." Lam shrugged. "She seems completely normal. It's surprising, actually, that neither of them have the Ancient gene. They shouldn't have been able to activate the time travel device on the ship."
Landry nodded. "I'll get some people to look at it."
Daniel Jackson and Cameron Mitchell stood in the cargo bay of the captured jumper, still sitting in the base at the Alpha Site.
"The ship's definitely been hot-wired to run without the Ancients' neural interface," Mitchell said. "Hell, I could fly this thing. But I don't see any modifications like that on the time machine. You think we need someone with the Ancient gene to activate it before we can open it up?"
"Unfortunately, there's no one at the SGC right now who we know has the gene," said Daniel. "Pretty much everyone we knew who did went with the Atlantis expedition. Besides, I'd rather not have it go off by accident again." He knelt down to get a closer look. "It is a time machine, though. I wonder if it could have been pre-programmed to detect a non-Ancient signature - to recognize someone they knew would eventually stumble across it." He turned to his side. "What do you think?"
"Why are you asking me?" Vala Mal Doran leered at Daniel out of the corner of her eye. "I don't exactly go around stealing time machines."
"Well, you've stolen everything else, at one point or another. Figured I'd ask." He turned back to Mitchell. "Maybe we should run some tests on it. See if it's putting out any kind of radio signal."
"Good idea," Mitchell said. "Let's head back and get the equipment."
