Chapter Summary: Arriving in the other dimension doesn't go quite as planned.
Chapter Word Count: 4,064

Brittany stood in front of the room, waiting for the noise to die down. Including the Council, there were almost two dozen people in the room. Support people, her exploration team, Andy, her girls, Sue and a few others.

"Ready?" she asked after everyone quieted. There was a lot of nodding and quiet yes's. "Okay, we're all here to review the plan for rescuing Miranda Priestly from an alternate universe. Let's start with the basic facts." Brittany stepped to the side to reveal the large screen.

"Seven years ago, on the way home from a trip to Tokyo, the small private plane carrying Miranda Priestly and her editorial staff disappeared between Tokyo and Hawaii," she said. "Nothing was found of the plane or its occupants. It disappeared from radar in mid air."

Brittany looked around the room. "So, we're all clear on this?" Heads nodded. "Less than five years ago, while investigating the Dragon Clan cruiser we found hidden just off the coast of Cancun, we found evidence of experiments conducted with a natural portal along the flight path taken by the Priestly aircraft. The two events were not connected until recently when one of our probes reported receiving a Clan emergency beacon when traveling into the portal."

"Were you able to determine where the beacon came from?" one of the engineers tapped to be support asked. "They all have a unique signature."

Reaching into the podium, Brittany pulled out a small object the fit snuggly into her palm. "This is it," she said. "It has been coded for this mission and will be placed in the plane just before it leaves Tokyo."

"I thought we were going to take it with us?" Andy asked.

"I changed my mind," Brittany said. "We'll be using one of the probes outfitted for time travel to get it there. It's a lot less risky. We send the probe back, it rendezvous with the plane and inserts the beacon into the plane's cargo hold. The probe will then keep in contact with the beacon the entire flight. This way we'll know exactly when and where the plane disappears."

"And then you send us through the portal to get her back," Andy said.

"Correct," Brittany said, returning the beacon to the podium.

"What did your infiltration team discover when they went through the portal," Quinn asked.

"The political and government structures of the alternate Tera seems very close to ours. There are a few cities with different names, and cities and towns that don't exist at all, but otherwise, a resident of this planet would feel at home there."

"Aliens? Like us?" Rachel asked.

"Aliens? Yes, though only several governments seem to know about them," Brittany said, nodding. "We haven't found many details yet. There's one species that look like the fabled Roswell greys, and another that is some kind of parasitic creature that takes over its host and likes to pretend to be ancient Egyptian gods. They apparently travel in pyramid shaped craft or through some kind of large portal. That's all we have so far. The Shadow infiltration team is still working to tap into the computers with detailed data."

"So we need quarantine procedures to deal with these parasites?" Santana said. "Or will our standard procedures work?"

"Standard procedures will work," Brittany said. "They'll show up as two beings in one body, with two different brain wave patterns."

"So, different than someone who's possessed?" Rachel asked.

"Yes," Brittany said. "Their eyes glow and they claim to be gods."

"When have the Clans run into possessed people?" Quinn asked.

"Not here," Rachel said. "If you really want to know when and how it was handled I can tell you later."

"Sorry," Quinn said to Brittany.

"Not a prob," Brittany said. "If any of these aliens are on that Earth they keep a very low profile. The black ops group, they call themselves the NID, that we got this from have a shoot first policy for them. Though based on other things we found in this group's files they deserve a shoot first policy also. They like to dissect unsuspecting aliens."

"So, don't run into aliens with glowing eyes, and don't run into these black ops people, these NID," Andy said. "Sounds very X-Files-ish Men in Black. What else do we need to know?"

"Tech-wise, as far as we can determine, we're several millennia ahead of them, aliens and Terran, so all of your equipment is designed to self destruct if someone unauthorized tries to take it apart," Brittany said. "Though not explosively."

"Good," Andy said. "Don't really want my stuff to accidentally explode."

"Most of the really high-tech stuff is inside you," Brittany said. "And that won't show up on any scanners other than ours."

"Okay," Andy said. "Do we have a meeting point with your team?"

"They're moving around, so at this point, no," Brittany said. "They'll contact you as soon as you go over."

"So, we're assuming no one can intercept our comms?" Quinn asked.

"Our comms use a form of encryption they don't seem to be aware of," Brittany said, "so even if they could detect our transmissions, they wouldn't be able to decode it."

"Good," Quinn said, nodding. "The plan seems very basic. Go through the portal, track down the beacon, find the missing plane and passengers, and come back."

"We aren't planning another invasion," Brittany said. "It really is that simple."

"Backup plans?" Andy asked.

"Only for things we can control or account for," Brittany said.

"Like?"

"If one of you gets captured, we'll send in a team to get you," Brittany said. "Several of Quinn's squads are in training now for such an occurrence. If you need assistance bringing Miranda back, they'll be available for that also."

"What if the portal closes?" Caroline asked. "How are we going to get Andy and Mom back then?"

"Good question," Brittany said. "Although the portal appears to be natural, and has been in that location for several thousand years, we do have plans if it disappears suddenly. Our Fleet scientists are working with Confederation scientists on a way to travel between this universe and that one. The physics appear to be fairly close. It's almost like time travel, but not exactly."

"We have time travel?" Cassidy asked excitedly, "so we could go get Mom before they go into the portal?"

"The Confederation doesn't allow time travel," Brittany said. "Not for any reason."

"Then how are you going to use it to put that beacon in Mom's luggage?" Caroline asked.

"The portal allows us to 'cheat'," Brittany said, "in a way. When a probe goes into it, it can come out at a different time. Sort of like skipping a stone across water. We use the portal to skip across time."

"What about those rules about time travel?" Andy asked.

"There are no rules about using a natural phenomena to travel in time. As long as you don't change anything. Which we aren't doing," Brittany said. "And the time travel isn't happening in our universe. So… loophole."

"Correct," Artie said. "Though after this rescue is over, it is very likely the loophole will be closed. The Confederation Council is not in agreement on allowing this but the discussions about it will take a number of galactic years."

"By which time we'll have rescued your mother," Brittany said, grinning.

"Tricky," Andy said. "So, did the original Clan discoverers know that you could use the portal for 'time travel'?"

"Well, they never reported it to the Confederation," Brittany said. "And there wasn't a whole lot of trust between the Clans and the Confederation at that time."

"Lucky us," Santana said, smirking.

"Yes," Brittany said, agreeing. "Lucky us."

"What else do we need to know that we haven't discussed?" Andy asked, joining Brittany at the front as the room broke down into smaller groups to discuss specific parts of the plan. "I've gone over everything you've given me about the other universe. I could repeat the whole plan, not just your overview, in my sleep."

"And she has," Cassidy said, giggling, as she and Caroline joined them.

"Tomorrow you'll go," Brittany said. "All of your equipment has been double checked. We're just waiting for the weather around the portal to clear up."

"Great!" Andy said. "I'm ready to get her back. It' been too long."

"And we want you back here with her," Caroline said.

"Yeah," Cassidy agreed. "We love you both and want you both back with us."

"I hope she isn't too upset at what we've been doing while she was gone," Andy said, rubbing her eyes.

"She loves us, loves you," Cassidy said, hugging her. "All she's going to care about is seeing us happy."

"I still want to go," Caroline said. "I can be stealthy."

"That wasn't the reason," Andy said, reminding her.

"I know but still…" Caroline said, pouting.

"We can have a big party when they get back," Cassidy told her sister. "Though not a surprise, you know how Mom hates surprise parties."

"The beacon has been inserted in the plane, Lady Shadow," her ops officer said. "All sensors are functioning properly."

"The telemetry from the probe can reach across time?" Quinn asked, looking at Brittany in surprise.

"Not completely," Brittany said. "We're using the portal to relay it. Unfortunately, the power required to do that through the portal's interference burns out even our most powerful probes in less than half a day."

"How much of this is science and how much is 'making it up as we go'?" Quinn asked.

"A lot of lucky guess work," Brittany said, grimacing. "And improvising."

"I'd feel a lot better about this if they were in a vehicle of some sort," Quinn said. "Just dumping them into a space anomaly and hoping for the best does not make me happy."

"I'm not happy about that either," Brittany said. "But the portal scrambles most electronics that aren't heavily shielded. And you saw that beacon. Ninety nine percent of that model is shielding. We've got beacons the size of the head of a pin that can broadcast across the Solar system. But to survive the trip through the portal it needed to be wrapped in a large amount of physical shielding. Our regular shields, if we could shrink them that small, wouldn't have worked."

"And sending Andy and the Potter twins in, wearing just those fancy new hard suits does?" Quinn asked, surprised.

"Yes," Brittany said. "The new hard suit was designed for this kind of mission, where too much tech can't go. For reasons we can't determine yet, the nanites we use aren't affected by the forces in the portal. As long as they are in their most basic form."

"My suit tech did mention that there was a much larger nanite percentage in these new suits than previous versions. She was impressed. How'd you get the Confederation to sign off on that anyway?" Quinn asked. "They were really against even giving us nanite tech a few years ago."

"I'm just clever that way," Brittany said. "I might have shared a few things with them. You wouldn't want me to give away all of my secrets would you?"

"No, I guess not," Quinn said. "As long as you didn't tell them all your secrets that went into the suits."

"And give up an advantage? No way!" Brittany said.

The turbulence was rough as they clung to the disc containing all of their equipment. Even wearing the supposedly impervious hard suit, Andy could feel the force of the wind as it swirled around them. Even the suits couldn't completely keep out the sound. It was too loud to talk to each other or to their control.

They'd jumped from a few hundred feet above the portal. High enough to protect the craft. But not so high they couldn't reach the portal. Andy had gone on a number of high jumps in the suit while training but this was different. This was real.

They could tell when they'd passed through the portal and were in the middle, the eye of the forces that powered the portal.

A sudden flash distracted her and she was suddenly flying across a large room, colliding with a wall before she could react. There was a flash of intense pain and everything went dark.

There was a large flash as they broached the other side of the portal, and it was silent again. The equipment disc suddenly tilted unevenly as if free of weight on one side.

Harry hung on tight and visually checked for her companions, her sister and Lady Andrea. Her sister was off to her left. Lady Andrea was not in her place to her right.

"Ginny!" Harry called desperately. "Where'd Lady A go?"

"She disappeared just as we passed through the portal horizon," Ginny said. "There was nothing. She just vanished."

"Nothing?" Harry said, slowly moving along the edge of the disc to even out its descent. "Are you picking up her beacon? Anything?"

"No, just the Shadow's," Ginny said glumly. "They're a thousand clicks to our east. Still out of vocal data range with the uplink."

"Okay, let's start drifting in that direction," Harry said. "As soon as they're close enough to contact we'll let them know what happened. Let's hope they can find her."

"Okay," Ginny said.

High up in the mountains along the west coast of this world's America, Joy and Janice had been collecting data about the planet they were on for several weeks. At the end of the day they would send an info burst back to base, bouncing it off a satellite to a probe that would briefly appear and relay it back. It wasn't the most exciting job but they'd trained for this kind of thing for years and this was the first time they'd been able to use their training.

While their snooper equipment gathered any information it could from any government traffic it detected, looking for signs of their target, they dug through and into any hardened sites their tools detected. They weren't as good as Lady Shadow at this, nobody was, but they were extremely good. There wasn't a computer system they couldn't eventually hack into. Lady Shadow wanted any information about aliens they could find and they were tracking down the clues they'd found so far while keeping an eye out for the team that would be coming to retrieve the Priestly contingent.

The plan had originally been to find Miranda Priestly, get her and head back, but finding out there were aliens in this universe had changed the plans slightly. The Clan wasn't going to be opening any trading posts any time soon but Lady Shadow wanted to be prepared if these aliens or this planet ever discovered the portal. They were just glad someone else had the task of searching for more portals.

"Joy, the probe said they'll be coming through any time now," Janice said. "Those cute Potter twins and Lady Andrea and their equipment."

"Cute?" Joy said. "That Harriet Potter owes me a drink."

"You should know better than to play games with them," Janice said. "They've got that whole psychic twin communication thing going on."

"That's cheating," Joy said. "Even if they claim the rules allow it."

"They're troopers," Janice said. "'Winning, with honor' is how they do things."

"Not sure I agree with their ideas about honor," Joy said. "How soon should we detect their beacons."

"Any time now," Janice said. "They've got those new ones and those new suits the Boss said we're all going to get."

"The ones that let us fly?"

"Yes," Janice said. "And the special camouflage."

"The Boss isn't going to like this," Joy said.

"Isn't going to like what?" Janice said.

"I'm only getting 2 suit beacons, and an equipment beacon. Somebody must not have made it through the portal," Joy said.

"That's not good," Janice said with wry understatement. "We still have that probe east of us, right?"

"It's doing a sweep over the New Mexico and Texas deserts right now," Joy said.

"Good," Janice said. "I'm going to use it to boost my scanner range. That portal doesn't like to stay in one place here, maybe it dumped the missing suit out somewhere else. Can you pick up who is missing yet?"

"Lady Andrea," Joy said, groaning. "The Boss really likes her."

"So, now we have another person to find. No problem. At least we know how to find her since she's wearing a suit." Janice hummed to herself for a few minutes. "Ah, faint signal to our east, though I'm not getting much of an exact direction. Somewhere in Colorado. Why does that sound familiar?"

"One of our target sites is there," Joy said. "The one where it looks like they've air-gapped it and have non-local encryption."

"Good, so we were going there anyway," Janice said, nodding to herself.

"This is Project Team P," a voice blared over their comm. "Come in Team A."

"Team A," Janice said. "Status?"

"We lost Lady A going through the portal," the Team P voice said. "Request immediate assistance in locating her."

"Optimists, aren't they," Joy said, smirking.

"On it," Janice said. "We noticed you seemed to be missing a team member. We are receiving a suit beacon to the east of us. As soon as you reach our camp we can send out a search party."

"Why can't you do that now?" the Team P voice asked, sounding anxious.

"We don't have enough resources, as you well know," Janice told them. "We're very bare bones on this Op."

"Agreed," the Team P voice said. "Homing in on your location. Out."

"Bare bones is one way to put it," Joy said, shaking her head. "Not even the budget for a top-of-the-line lair."

"We're the good guys," Janice said. "We don't have a lair."

"We could easily make one," Joy said. "I've got lots of plans. Bond villain lairs, or Kim Possible lairs. Or all sorts of others."

"You've been thinking about this too much," Janice said, shaking her head. "We don't need a lair."

"But just think how useful one would be. Instead of digging out an underground cave like we have now, we could have traps and things," Joy said.

"Traps for who?" Janice asked.

"Well, if those snake parasite aliens ever find us or the NID discovers us sneaking around," Joy said, "We'll need them then."

"They aren't going to know we're here," Janice said. "And we aren't going to tell them, right?"

"Right," Joy said, pouting. "But it would make for excellent training."

"No," Janice said. "No extra training. Where did you even get this idea from?"

"Contingency plan Double A," Joy said.

"Well, forget about it," Janice said. "We aren't going to run into them so we won't need a lair of any sort." She glanced over at Joy. "And no amount of pouting is going to work."

"But you still love me?" Joy said.

"You are occasionally cute," Janice said.

"And lovable," Joy said.

"And lovable," Janice said, agreeing.

"Not where I'd expect to find that pair of Shadows," Ginny said, as they trudged through the snow covered forest. "No place to party within miles."

"That's when they aren't working," Harry said. "They take their job very seriously, and Lady Shadow wouldn't have sent them on this mission if they weren't serious."

"Not sure I agree about that," Ginny said. "Lady Shadow has a wicked sense of humour."

"But all of the Council take their jobs seriously. We need to find Lady A as soon as possible. Before we find the Priestly plane."

"Shouldn't be too hard," Ginny said. "Just need to find her suit beacon."

"And what if she ended up in a different time? We used the portal to go back in time to here," Harry said. "She could have come out anywhen."

"Then we find when and go and get her," Ginny said. "It's time travel. That gives us plenty of time to work things out."

"And there they are," Harry said, her suit sensors lighting up. "It looks like they've been here a lot longer than I thought they would be," she said. "Looks like a nice cozy setup."

"They are Shadows," Ginny said. "They like their comfort."

"Hello!" Harry said over their local Clan comm channel. "Anybody home?"

"Of course we're home, where would we go?" Came back the reply. "Get in here before you let all of the warm air out." A door slid open.

"What about our equipment," Ginny asked, not entering.

"Plenty of room," Joy said. "We've got everything ready."

"Yeah, get in here," Janice said. "Just wipe off the snow first."

Sighing, Ginny and Harry entered the small camp. The Shadows might think it was large but it was a lot smaller than they were used to for a field camp.

Popping their helmets they looked around.

"Cozy," Harry said. "Where can we put our equipment. It's still outside."

"We have an equipment shed," Joy said. "Through that door."

"Outside access?" Harry asked.

"Of course," Joy said. Grabbing her coat, she pulled it on. "Let's get your things inside."

"When can we go after Lady A?" Ginny asked, after they'd gone outside to deal with the equipment.

"We need to find her first," Janice said. "Her suit beacon is very faint. We aren't getting any telemetry from it. Just a vague sense of direction from our sensors."

"But she's still alive?" Ginny asked.

"Yes, definitely," Janice said. "Still alive. Not sure of her condition otherwise."

"Okay. Any success finding the plane?" Harry asked.

"The beacon seems to have been removed from the plane," Janice said. "We were able to locate it but there was no plane wreckage near it."

"How is that possible?" Ginny asked. "The probe said there was wreckage before. That's why we came here."

"No idea," Janice said. "Something changed. The plane wasn't where the probe said it would be. The wreckage is completely gone."

"Are we in the wrong time?" Ginny asked. "Before the plane crashed?"

"No, it's the right time," Joy said. "We have located the original beacon."

"We can worry about the plane once we get Lady Andrea back," Harry said. "Find her."

"On it," Janice said, turning towards her sensor bank.

"No indication of what is causing this?" General Hammond asked. "Natural phenomena or unwanted visitors?"

"Unknown at this point, sir," Major Carter said. "It sets off our sensors and disappears. And reappears at irregular intervals."

"But it's been very frequent the last few months?" the General asked.

"Yes, sir," Carter said.

"Let me know if you find anything concrete," he said. "The Pentagon is getting anxious."

Before he could dismiss her, the sound of alarms could be heard over the base intercom. "Intruder in the Gate Room" blared out, twice. Before he could get out from behind his desk, the sounds stopped.

"What in the blasted," he grumbled, reaching for the Gate Room duty phone. "Lieutenant! What in tarnation is going on down there," the General shouted.

"An unknown person appeared in the Gate room," the Duty officer said. "They appear to be unconscious."

"Did they come through the Gate," Hammond asked, "Lieutenant?"

"Only physically, sir."

"Is there any other way?" the General asked, waving an anxious Major Carter out of his office, knowing her first stop would be the Gate Room.

"Sir, the Gate was not running when this person came through," the Lieutenant said. "They flew through the gate as if thrown at a high speed."

"Where are they now?" General Hammond asked.

"Doctor Fraiser is taking them to the infirmary," he said. "They were unable to remove the suit. Or helmet. She believes she'll have better luck there. Colonel O'Neill and SG-2 are providing security."

"Suit?"

"They're wearing something out of a Japanese cartoon, sir," the Lieutenant said. "Some kind of high tech armor."

"I understand," the General said. "Is Major Carter there yet?"

"She's headed towards the infirmary," the Lieutenant said.

"Call me if anything else happens," the General said.

"Yes, sir!"

The General hung up the phone. He was tempted to head to the infirmary himself but suspected the presence of SG-1, and SG-2, was enough chaos for Major Fraiser to handle while dealing with their unexpected visitor.