AU: The two General Carter's and Teal'c are on their way to Halla to find Thor when Jacob decides it could be fun to mess with NASA...

TRIGGERS: Mention of underage relationship (Sam and John)

Chapter 30: Astronomical Travel

Wednesday, 23rd June 2004 – Solar System – Jacob Carter

Sam was shivering despite the long sleeve top, sweater and jacket she was wearing along with the ships somewhat paltry internal heating system. Unfortunately for her, Tok'ra – like Goa'uld and Jaffa – did not require many layers of clothing to stay warm, nor did they need to concern themselves with excessive heat, hence why we always chose desert planets. The more inhospitable, the less likely we would be to have visitors – unwelcome or otherwise.

Though I wasn't entirely convinced that her shivering was because of the ambient temperature and more likely to do with the fact that she was out here again and that last time she was quite literally out there along with the stress she carried over the mission to rescue Jack. She had a lot riding on getting him home, not that she had been overly forthcoming on what that was, only that it had something to do with John and his orders.

With Teal'c at the helm guiding us out of the solar system, there was little we could do but wait until we were a safe distance from Earth. Sam was pacing, only I dared not tell her to stop since the last time – about 15 minutes ago – earned me a gruff retaliatory remark along the lines of 'I don't pace Dad'. She was right. She never did pace, but she was absolutely pacing now.

"What do you think it does?" I asked to take her mind off the fact that she was in space again. I knew the last time she was out here ended badly, hence her agitation.

She held the… whatever it was… up to her eye level, turned it in her fingers and ran her hands over its smooth pearlescent egg-shaped surface gently, "I'm not sure. Jack just said it would make us go faster. He didn't say how." Though the look of concentration on her face suggested that she was thinking about his words and its potential application.

"Perhaps it replaces the acceleration crystals." Teal'c ventured from his position at the console. While his idea had merit, the device in Sam's hand was too small and the wrong shape to fit in the crystal banks.

"Maybe the main crystal. I'm just a little... apprehensive using it so close to home." She replied while teething her bottom lip the way she did when she was nervous or nutting out a problem that the rest of us had no clue about. Her words about being so close to home made me smile because a few years ago, I would never have considered being in space – as we passed within a few thousand kilometres of Saturn and its impressive rings of ice, dust and rocks – as being close to home. Now, well… it was like we had just driven down the street from home and turned left.

"Probably a good idea. We don't need an amateur astronomer seeing us disappear and calling NASA." I suggested without intending it to be funny. Sam however clearly did find it entertaining because she snorted her amusement in a way I had never heard from her before.

"Ya think?" She replied while still laughing, the tone of voice and chosen words as Jack O'Neill as I had ever heard them which in turn made me laugh and shake my head in her direction. "What?" She replied, swinging her head between me and Teal'c while trying to cover the fact that she was still laughing.

"Nothing. Nothing at all." I said with a smile, truly happy to see her happy. Despite her hard life through those 50 extra years, whatever it was that Jack and John did to rewind at least some of her time had made her smile in the same way that my Sam did on Alpha when she talked about Jack. The love I saw in her eyes spoke volumes, so there was no way I could ever begrudge those two men. They gave my daughter – daughters – a better life filled with love and happiness.

"Are you sure it's nothing? You have this look about you." Sam prompted though her fingers still moved over the egg stone while her eyes focused on its surface looking for any imperfections.

"You know. We could send the NASA nerds scrambling." I offered with a look of mischievousness that had Sel'mak tutting in my mind. Not that she would do anything to stop me because secretly, the old girl loved to pull pranks despite her advanced age.

"Watch it, Jacob." She admonished when I briefly forgot that she could actually read all my thoughts, even the fleeting ones.

"Sorry. Wisdom. I meant 'despite your advanced wisdom'." I corrected for her.

"Sure you did." She laughed in mind.

"Why would you want to do that?" Sam asked, her eyes now settling on me instead of Jack's creation, the squint-eyed look of 'what are you thinking' spearing me in a way that just made me what to do it all the more. It was strange how it took an alien symbiote for me to able to be myself with my daughter instead of the stuffy stiff Major General I spent my first life forcing myself to be. I did not miss that man in the slightest.

I shrugged and smirked. "An old buddy of mine who works there is probably on shift right now." I said with a grin. Back in the day he would prank as many people as he could, so I reasoned that since he was not cleared and would never know it was me, I'd have one up on him perpetually which I could perhaps lord over him when and if I ever managed to make it to another poker game of his. He didn't have to know how I knew about the incident. Sometimes the word 'classified' was the perfect cover for these things.

"Dad..." She replied in her typical long-suffering daughter voice that was generally reserved for conversations about boys when she was at school, or her CO at a certain Air Medal ceremony when she was but a Captain and clearly smitten with her boss.

I smiled, "C'mon, Sammie. Where is your sense of adventure?"

"Aren't you supposed to be responsible, immutable and hard-assed as a Major General in the Air Force?" She argued.

The shrug and hands up 'yeah OK' gesture came as naturally to me as understanding physics came to Sam. "Who says I'm not still that when I have to be?" I asked.

"This morning, before the briefing, you walked into my office eating one of those jelly snakes – head first – citing that Sel'mak thought it was funny." She countered easily with a raise of her eyebrows and a no-nonsense tone of voice.

"It was funny. Sel'mak laughed." I defended the silliness displayed in an attempt to lighten the dark mood that had settled over the SGC since the program review began.

"I did not." She replied as haughtily as any woman when proven wrong.

"Yes, you did. After I explained it." I countered to her earning myself a snort that she had learned from being around too many Tau'ri.

"I can't believe we – you and me – are discussing pranking a NASA official." She scoffed making me grin.

Sometimes I wondered if there was anything left of the rigid Air Force General I had been for so long. With everything we faced in the galaxy and the constant base hopping, I found Sel'mak and I needed a little levity in our lives from time to time. The Tok'ra had even less of a sense of humour than the typical hard-nosed General's at the Pentagon. Lantash had been the only other Tok'ra who understood the concept of having a laugh. He had also been the only other Tok'ra to allow his host to speak in his place at Council meetings.

"Jack would do it." I replied, snatching the stone from her hands and walking towards the engine room.

"No he would not." She insisted rather forcefully while chasing after me. Teal'c had followed, clearly interested in the effect that this stone would have on the ship's propulsion. Either that, or he was enjoying the joking banter. One never could tell with him though I had it on good authority that him and Jack were terrors during downtime.

"Oh really. Just how well do you know that ex-CO of yours, hmm?" The question was meant to draw out an answer typical of a military woman who had served with the man for years all the while loving him from the shadows.

"Pretty well, I assure you. Dad." She countered with a tilt of her eyebrows and a small yet suggestive smirk on her face. "I practically lived with him for over four months." It left me with a feeling of curiosity-laden shock and a touch of embarrassment because I was pretty sure my daughter just alluded to knowing John rather more intimately than I was expecting due to their incredible physical age gap. Not that I should have been surprised. Sammie never had cared about anything as paltry as an age gap, what with her PT instructor at the academy who was well into his 30's when she was barely out of her teen years, Jonas who was 14 years her senior and of course the original Jack.

Suddenly her shutdown about how she was so much younger than the math said she should be made sense. Jack had taken an Ancient download. The Ancient's were known to possess healing abilities. It wasn't uncommon to hear of sexual healing rituals amongst the ancient mythologies of Earth. The stories and teachings had to have come from somewhere. Not that I would say anything about my suspicions.

Honestly, it didn't matter. What mattered is that she was here… again, with a second chance to get a few things right.

~ ~ J 💞 S ~ ~

As we walked through the ostentatious yet intricately engraved golden corridors and into the quiet hum of the engine room, I had a momentary flash of a memory from the last time I was in this ship. More of a feeling really. The incredible feeling of wanting so badly to kiss my Colonel greeted me, long before he became my General. But that was forever in my past, and I would never get the opportunity to feel what I felt for him ever again because he was gone. Split off from this universe or overwritten. It didn't matter. Either way we would never get our one day which was sad because now – even though I was technically 90 – the Jack and John of this reality had given me 33 years of my life back. I felt younger, stronger and more alive, yet I still could not have him because he was either married to Samantha or a 16-year-old who looked 19 years old and had taken the first tentative step to be with someone his own age. He deserved to have a full life after the first one was so cruelly taken from him.

Brushing the non-event from my mind, I strode over to the crystal banks, Dad by my side and Teal'c close behind. Opening the middle bank of crystals, I looked down to see the swapped over crystals and marvelled over how Jack's modification still worked with nothing but a zat pulse. Teal'c had displayed almost a childlike glee as we passed the Moon when I instructed him to zat the crystals.

Almost. As almost as Teal'c ever managed.

Now we were going to apply yet another Jack O'Neill modification. Last time, the engines were so taxed when we returned from the Praclarush Taonas flight that the ship sat on a section of hard stand at Cheyenne Mountain cordoned off for the purpose of landing a Tel'tak while puffs of black smoke wafted from the external grating after limping home from Antarctica. The engineers who wanted to break it down for reverse engineering managed to patch it up enough to fly, though the ship barely made it to Halla before its demise. I had never said as much to Teal'c but even if the singularity had not pulled us in, we would never have left that part of space. Everything was failing. It would only have been a matter of time. I figured that this time Jack must have done something else – something new – to increase its resistance to the additional energy running through its conduits, intakes and the engine itself, almost as if he knew – without me telling him – that we would need this Tel'tak again.

"Ready?" Dad said, holding up the crystal that would in no way fit in any of the receptacles. I still couldn't believe that this man – my father – was completely OK with doing this so close to home.

"I guess." I replied as I retrieved the crystal from his fingers and bent forward to see whereabouts I could place it, figuring that maybe all I had to do was create a connection with the main crystal by allowing them to touch.

Easier said than done.

Looking closely, I decided that sitting the egg stone on top of the rear crystals and leaning it against the large purple crystal would be enough. Well, I hoped it would because we had no way of connecting it to the system.

"Here goes nothing." I said into the crystal tray while my father looked on from the other side and Teal'c stood at the end of the tray, hands behind his back observing both of us. "You might want to hold onto something. You know, just in case this works." I said mostly to Teal'c and somewhat to Dad since he had already reached out to hold onto the top of the crystal tray.

"Do not concern yourself with me, General Carter." Teal'c responded and continued to stand with his hands behind his back, though I did note a slight bend in his knees ready to compensate for any increase in speed.

"Ohhkay." I replied and lifted the stone then twisted my wrist slightly so that I could get it into the area I had decided it should go.

Suddenly, there was a strange magnetic pull on the stone, and it crackled, small golden arcs of electricity travelled from the purple crystal to the stone zapping me in the process. When I tried to pull my hand back, the stone would not move.

"Ahh… dammit." I cursed as my hand retreated while the stone remaining suspended in the cavity of the crystal by the golden arcs making no contact with any of the crystals. "What is it with ships and zapping me." I complained to no one in particular hoping that this little event would not cause me to end up in some other place in the timeline because wouldn't that just be some other kind of crappy fate.

"Well, you don't see that every day." Dad commented and let go of his hold on the tray to put his hands on his hips and glare at the little stone that was doing absolutely nothing but sitting there with upwards travelling golden arcs of electrical light that looked like miniature waves.

"Yeah." I responded drily, then reached my fingers towards the stone.

"Sam. Probably not a good idea." Dad warned as my fingers came into contact with the stone.

The sudden influx of speed was phenomenal, sending both Teal'c and Dad to the ground while I remained in my upright crouched position, the golden waves of light had changed to a deep purple colour and were travelling easily three times as fast. In contrast, there were white electrical waves of light travelling the length of the purple crystal.

"Holy Hannah!" I breathed as I pulled my hand away to find several little pinpricks of blood on my fingertips. "Naquadah." I said as my gaze fell on Dad in his crumpled position sitting on the floor.

"A little notice would have been nice." He grumbled giving me the same derisive look he had when he discovered I had blown up his new 4-slice toaster. An event he had never forgotten and sought to remind me of as often as possible.

"Hey, I told you to hold on. It's not my fault that you let go." I replied haughtily with a smile on my face, not just at my father, but at Teal'c who looked absolutely ridiculous sitting on his ass with his legs splayed and hands out behind him, so much so that I had to wonder if this was the first time he had landed on his butt.

"Indeed." He grumbled making me giggle even louder.

"Think your buddy will notice that?" I asked Dad as he got back to his feet and dusted his hands down his leathers even though this ship had been hermetically sealed after Antarctica.

"We'll see. If Jack's first point of business as a General is to explain the unexplainable or explain to the President why he had to read in yet another civilian, then we will know." Dad commented while bending his back until it cracked so loudly that I flinched. I never did like that sound, though I was smart enough not to make my displeasure known. "C'mon, let's go see how much of a boost that stone gave us."

"Probably not that much. Jack's modification already doubled the ship's velocity. There is only so much force the chassis of a ship can handle even the zero-gravity environment of space." I explained to two people who probably couldn't care less. At least Jack used to stop me from rambling. At first, I thought it was because I was confusing him, but after a while I realised that he knew exactly what I was saying and understood the vast majority of it. My most profound memory of his intelligence had been one night not long after his covert mission when he called me at home. I had still been upset over his indifference on Edora and his feigned deception. Rather than talk about things we couldn't, he asked me about the particle accelerator.

How it worked. How I built it. What materials I used.

In the end, he said thank you and sorry and a bunch of other platitudes that he shouldn't have spoken on an unsecured open line to someone under his command.

"Is that right?" Dad asked, pulling me out of my silent musings. Focusing on the overhead display, I noticed that the distance to our marked location was reducing so rapidly that we could not see the last number in the long line ticking down and since we were talking two million lightyears, that was fast.

"That's… impossible." I replied.

"Improbable." Teal'c corrected from his position behind me. I turned to find him standing with his hands behind his back with his eyebrow raised.

"Yeah." I replied and turned back to the display. Pressing a few buttons on my wrist watch to begin a three-minute timer – the Colonel's favourite number of minutes – I took note of the number and waited. When my watch beeped, we had a difference of almost 829 lightyears which was… astronomical. As I looked outside, I could see a white shimmering glow undulating across the surface, almost like a shield, protecting the Tel'tak from destruction.

"Sam?" Dad prompted for more information.

"Umm, if I'm right…" I began then chewed my lip because I honestly had no idea because calculating the speed increase would require me to remember the distance from Earth to Taonas and how long that trip took before and after Jack's upgrades.

"If you're right?" He prompted again because I had stalled.

"We'll be there in five days. Give or take." I murmured making him cough and look at the screen.

"OK." He replied and tilted his head with a look of pure bewilderment. "Two million lightyears in 120-hours." He repeated.

"Give or take." I added for him because that was an incredibly loose calculation, and I had no idea if I was remotely close the mark. It was solidly in the realm of guesswork.

That was assuming that the ship lasted the journey and didn't spontaneously explode, or the crystals didn't rupture, but I didn't think that kind of doomsday observation would be of any interest to either of the men travelling with me. So I took my seat in the co-pilot's chair and alternated my vision between the obscenely fast numbers and the streaks of light flying past us as we sped toward our destination.