Our Legacy - Chapter 4
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor profit from their use - I merely toy with them for my own amusement.
Summary: A gate accident strands Jack and Sam in the year 2034, when the SGC is under the command of General Samantha Carter. But all is not as it seems, and to get home, they first need to save the world.
The next morning, Beth knocked on their door at 0659. Jack opened the door blinking at the harsh light of the corridor.
"Good morning." She greeted them cheerfully, entering the room and shutting the door behind her.
"I see you're a morning person." Jack grouched. "Like Carter."
"Don't worry, Jake's a grouch in the morning too." She teased him. "Are you ready? For breakfast?"
"The word breakfast shouldn't sound so sinister. Even if it is code for a cunning escape plan." Jack complained.
"We're ready." Sam answered as she came out of the bathroom. "What do we have to do?"
"Just follow my lead."
They followed her out of the room and through the corridors of the SGC, the lone guard assigned to them following closely. They took the elevator to the commissary level, which was very busy at this hour, and Beth literally bumped into a woman coming out of the commissary at speed.
"Oh! I'm so sorry Serena, I didn't see you there." Beth apologised.
Jack looked at the other woman sharply at the mention of the name. She was tall too, like Beth, but had a tiny frame and long, thick black hair.
"It's fine sweetie, don't worry about it. Oh – hi Josh." Serena's attention was now fully fixed on the one guard who had escorted them up to breakfast. She sashayed towards him with a swing of her hips and a winning smile. "How's the football injury?"
Jack gaped as Daniel Jackson's grown up daughter started flirting outrageously with their guard. He would have stayed there gawking longer, if Beth hadn't tugged urgently on his sleeve. He turned his attention back to her, and, following her lead, slipped away as a couple of groups of people left the commissary, swarming around them. Free of the crowd of people, the three of them moved quickly through a familiar set of corridors until they reached the access shaft. Beth keyed in a code, and the door swung open with a loud grating complaint.
She climbed in, followed by Sam, and Jack took up the rear, pulling the shaft door closed behind him. Then, they climbed. Twenty-plus floors of ladder. He had to admire his daughter's stamina, especially considering she wasn't Air Force trained.
When they finally reached the top, Beth took out a cellphone, and placed a call, letting it ring three times before she hung up.
It was clearly a signal to someone on the other side, as the hatch above them opened in response. A young man in his early twenties with the same blonde hair and brown eyes as Beth, appeared in the circle of open sky above them. "All clear." He said.
They climbed out in turn, and Beth introduced the grinning young man.
"This is Jake, my brother. Jake … Major Samantha Carter and Colonel Jack O'Neill, from the year 2000."
"Awesome." He grinned. "Hi guys."
"Hi." Jack responded, a little overwhelmed by meeting his son.
"Jake?" Beth prompted when her brother had just stood grinning at the younger versions of his parents for a moment.
"Right! Sorry. I've got a car waiting, about a mile that way." He pointed. "Are we waiting for Serena?"
"No, she's going to make her own way to the house."
"Where are we going?" Jack asked.
"My place." Beth answered. "I have a house about ten miles away. It's a twenty minute drive, once we reach the car."
They started hiking through the woods, away from the base.
"I disabled the GPS, and I'll log in as an anonymous user so they can't immediately trace the car – but even so it won't take them long to figure out it was us, so we shouldn't stay at your place for too long." Jake warned.
"I know. We'll just pick up the gear, meet Serena, and then move to the safe-house."
"You've got secure transportation to get to the safe-house?" Jack asked.
"We have. It's Asgard beaming technology. Mom arranged it in advance, and she made it completely untraceable. But it will only work once, and we all have to be together, with everything we need, ready to go."
"The Asgard know about this?" Sam asked.
Beth shot her an uncertain look, the same look she got every time she had to reveal something new about the future. "No, the Asgard shared the technology with Earth a while back."
"Cool." Jack commented.
"Very cool." Sam agreed. "I don't suppose I could …"
"Nice try, Mom. You know there's no way we can let you get too close a look at any technology while you're here. It could muck up the timeline." Jake said teasingly.
Sam flushed, whether at being called 'Mom' or being caught out in trying to get a sneaky look at the Asgard technology, Jack wasn't sure.
Beth's cellphone rang and she whipped it out of her pocket and answered it. Jack snorted in amusement at Sam craning her neck subtly to try and get a good look at the device, which looked nothing like the cellphones of the year 2000.
"Ok, see you later." Beth hung up the call. "That was Serena, she's out of the SGC, and now she's making her way through the checkpoints outside the mountain. She thinks she'll be about a half hour."
"She'll get there around the same time as us." Jake commented.
"The stargate and the SGC is public knowledge, so security is significantly tighter around the mountain than it was in your time." Beth told them.
"They went public?" Jack asked. "How did that go?"
"It was … messy." Beth said.
"There was a war." Jake added. "The stargate program as a whole isn't run by the US military anymore, the International Oversight Advisory is in control. Because of the USAF's extensive experience at the SGC, the majority of personnel involved in the operation of the actual SGC are still USAF, but there are units from other countries' militaries there too, and ultimately Mom – General Carter – has to answer to the IOA, not the President of the United States. And Atlantis is purely international."
He stopped when Beth punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Jake. Ix-nay on the Lantis-Atlay."
"Oh. Right, sorry. Anyway, the upshot is an organisation called the Tau'ri Unification Movement rose up out of the ashes of the war, originally out of a coalition of the countries who hadn't known about the Stargate before it went public, and who didn't subsequently have a seat at the IOA's table. Their original mandate was to replace the IOA or at least campaign for it's organisational structure to change, so that there was proportionate representation for all the countries in the world."
"That doesn't sound too unreasonable." Sam said.
"No, it doesn't. Except its leadership was very quickly taken over by a mixture of corrupt corporations and rogue militias, and is heavily sponsored by the Chinese government – the Chinese and the Americans being the main aggressors in the aforementioned war. Now, the T.U.M. is very bad news, and isn't really trying to get fair representation at all. It's just a vehicle for some very powerful and very corrupt people to seize more power over the stargates, and the technology that gets developed via the Stargate Program."
"It sounds like the rogue NID on steroids." Jack commented, sharing an alarmed look with Sam.
"It's the T.U.M. who are replacing people in positions of power." Beth explained. "They're the ones who have Mom. Our job is to rescue her, so she can expose them."
"And then send you home." Jake added.
Jack thought for a moment as they hiked. "Listen, not that I'm not on board with saving General Carter, and saving the world from bad guys, but is there a reason why you need us for this? If you have the device to send us home, and you have all the intel to break Carter out of the T.U.M.'s grubby paws yourself, why not just let us go home?"
Beth stopped walking, and the others followed suit. "Honestly? We need you because we're out of our depth. We – me, Jake and Serena – we're all in our twenties without any experience of this sort of situation, and Jake's the only one who even has any combat training. We can't tell anyone else about this because we don't know who's been replaced, or who we can trust. If we took this on ourselves, with just the three of us … we might get her back, or we might completely screw it up and get ourselves killed. This is the safety of the entire planet we're talking about, there's too much at stake not to press every advantage, and you two are the biggest advantage we're going to get."
"Not to mention the fact that Mom already knows that this is how it's supposed to go down, because she's been through this all before, when she was … you." He gestured haphazardly to Sam.
Jack sighed, and looked at Sam for a quick, wordless conversation. "Ok, we're in."
Beth blew out a harsh breath of relief. "Good. Let's keep moving."