Mathématique: The Sky Calls to Us

Sam Carter is alone.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain. Violence. Near-death experiences.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

The Sky Calls to Us

Sam Carter is alone.

Two corridors over, gunfire echoes off planar cement. Compression waves blur and blend into a continuous auditory platform that her mind tries to bound and modulate into something that will end. The roar of a chemical rocket. The propagation of thunder over the long, flat geographies of her childhood. But the sound doesn’t go. It continues.

Carter blinks in the turbid air.

There’s a girl on the other end of her gun.

She’s dressed in the slimming leather of the Lucian Alliance that Vala used to favor. Her dark hair brushes her shoulders and gleams under emergency light in a way that suggests, in the sun, it might be red. Her skin is pale and her hands are delicate and her gaze flicks from screen to keyboard, like she’s unfamiliar with Earth-based tech.

This is probably her first time tangling with SGC systems.

She looks so young.

Even so, Carter knows that quick shift, that hard focus, the grit required to commit to taking action in an unknown system with a foreign interface. She knows it.

Her fingers fan over her sidearm’s grip.

She should pull the trigger.

Why is she hesitating?

She thinks of Daniel. Her heart aches.

Her fingertip rests on the trigger. The girl is in her sights.

He’ll be disappointed.

He balances at local maxima, curves falling sharply away from him in all directions. He takes his time. He draws success from the cosmos with the strength of his own belief.

She can’t do that.

Can she?

Oh god.

There are two men flanking the girl. The woman. The clear and present threat to the base.

The pair looms over her. Their eyes sweep the hallways, scan the ceiling, study the floor. They don’t know each other well. They lack coordination. They lack alignment.

Maybe she can work with that.

The air is thick with mist that hides the shock of Carter’s hair. It’s always been a liability in the field, in the dark, but here, if she doesn’t move, they won’t see her.

She suppresses the urge to cough, building in the back of her throat.

The girl is the asset. The girl is the brains. The girl is the key to their whole operation and taking her out is a tactical imperative. Jack would do it. Jack would’ve done it already. Jack fired point blank through the chest of an AI system wearing the face and the body and the mind of a weeping child. Jack left Kevin Elliot to die alone, holding the line with a vial of poison. Jack would do this.

On the day they’d met, something in his voice had sliced open a wound she already carried. A wound that doesn’t heal when he goes. A wound she doesn’t understand. One that sings damaged networks to sleep, designs explosives, fixes what’s broken. In machines. Not in people. Never in people, somehow.

Her eyes sting and tear in the turbid air.

She can’t wait any longer.

Again, she fans her fingers over warm and waiting metal.

She steps forward, raises her weapon, sights down the barrel, and fires. She turns the kickback into a stance shift, adjusts her aim, fires again. The two LA goons vanish into the mist.

The girl stands alone, her eyes wide and dark.

“Hands where I can see them,” Carter says.

Lightning quick, the girl draws her weapon.

They fire simultaneously.

Carter’s head cracks against the cement before her brain processes what’s happened.

It’s always like this.

The pain in the back of her head and the pain in her chest war for attention until her brain sorts them into a priority queue. The chest is the problem. She inhales, gasping and shallow. Already she tastes blood in the back of her throat.

If she’d been a little more like Daniel, a little more willing to spend time she didn’t have—

She shuts her eyes. Waits for the second shot.

But it doesn’t come.

She turns over, not looking at herself. She doesn’t have to look to know it’s bad. She feels it’s bad. One hand finds the wound and presses down. She aims her gun at the girl.

 

Frightened eyes meet hers and Carter feels a wave of sympathy. This is probably the first time the little Lucian Alliance operative has been shot. The girl’s gun is on the floor, half-hidden by the white mist, but—

The weapon is under her fingers, pointed at Carter.

“Hey.” She pulls in a careful inhale. “What’s your name?”

The girl doesn’t speak. Her breath comes like sobs, but her eyes are dry. Wide and frightened.

The mist is thicker near the floor. It’s hard to see. Hard to breathe. “My name.” Carter breathes again, careful and slow. “Is Sam.”

“Carter,” the girl mouths.

She nods.

“I know you,” the girl says.

“How?”

“Your systems.”

Carter smiles, careful not to show her bloodstained teeth. She knows how frightening that can look.

Her systems.

Her systems.

Her crackable, transparent, compromised systems that are in pieces in the air all around them.

“I’ve heard you,” the girl says, “in your lab. In your ‘briefings’.”

Carter laughs once. Or maybe it’s a sob. The Goa’uld, the Lucian Alliance, the Trust, the NID—they’ve trickled like water into the cracks between SGC personnel and frozen there. Expanding, breaking wherever they find a seam.

“We have no texts,” the girl says. “No writings of our own on how to communicate with machines. Only examples. Gained with great difficulty.”

She’s self-taught. Daniel crouches beside her in the mist. His robes are blue, his eyes and hair sun-bleached. All his color resists the dull red of the emergency light.

“What’s your name?” Carter whispers.

Daniel smiles a small, approving smile.

“Ginn,” the girl says. “Ginn of the Sixth House.”

“Ginn.” Carter wipes blood from her mouth, struggling to breathe in air that is becoming thicker. Whiter. More opaque. “Hi.”

Desert warmth comes over her in a wave. The smell of sand and sun. How many times have you seen me die? Daniel whispers.

She looks up at him, her eyes full. She’s soldered him to her soul. Her dearest friend. But he’s halls away, holding the gateroom with Mitchell. With Teal’c.

He can’t be here.

He crouches above her, sun-weathered. A little older than the man she knows. If these are your last moments, Sam, make them count.

“You could stay,” she rasps. “You could stay, if you help me.”

Ginn’s eyes flick over Carter, lingering on the wound in her chest, then up to the wall-mounted monitor.

“You can’t want this,” Carter says, knowing she might be wrong, knowing she barely understands Alliance culture, knowing it’s not the right thing to say. “This life.”

“We’re not like you.” Ginn’s expression twists.

“I know.” Carter presses her lips together. Swallows blood. She takes a shuddering breath, her eyes wet, her airways wet.

Ginn says nothing, but her hand leaves her gun. Moves to her shoulder.

Sam Carter’s life begins to flash from the darkness of her mind. Alien battles. House plants in the sun. Shopping with Vala. Storms on the great plains. Small shreds of her childhood. The smooth contour of the popcorn she’d shared with her brother, watching—

Try again, Daniel says, gentle and patient, like her heart isn’t failing. Like she has more than a handful of seconds left.

“Ginn.” She swallows blood. Tries to breathe. She tries to be kind, like Daniel always is, in the moments of his deaths. “What was the plan?”

“To flood the building with a compound that will fluoresce when exposed to the EM field of a Lantean gene,” the girl says raggedly. “To tag your people and take them. To shut down the air circulators, displacing the oxygen.”

Carter shuts her eyes, her face contorting in misery. If she dies, everyone on the lower levels dies. Cam. Teal’c. Jack O’Neill, after all these years, oh god.

Don’t give up, Daniel says, and the air turns clearer. Drier.

“Tell me about the air recirculators.”

“Set to go offline.”

“When.”

“Five minutes.”

Carter breathes through blood and tears.

You’re her teacher, Daniel says. You taught her to speak to machines. How to talk to Ancient crystal through code. Machine language. He looks at her fondly. Go ahead and ask.

“Help me get them back?” Carter whispers. “Help me keep them on?” She smiles, trying to forget that she can’t stand, that standing will kill her, that she will die anyway, bleeding out in a back corridor of level twenty-eight.

“Someone has closed my access ports,” Ginn whispers.

The bowl is smooth under her hands. The light from the television flickers into the dark as Mark elbows her and says, “Move over, Sam. Jeez.” She slides sideways on the couch, her eyes still on the screen.

“Then let’s,” Carter rasps with the last of her strength, “open them.” She gets to her knees and then, impossibly, to her feet. She collapses into the corridor wall, leaving a dark smear as she passes.

Her body will fail. But it hasn’t happened yet.

“Get up,” Carter grinds the words from grist, showing the girl how.

Ginn begins to move.

Carter’s vision dims at its edges. Her hands close around a wall-mounted keyboard. “Don’t be afraid,” she rasps. “Our medics work miracles.”

I remember. Daniel is a sun-and-sand presence at her shoulder.

Ginn is up, one hand on the wall, the other clamped over her injury. She took Carter’s shot right beneath her clavicle. She might live. She might.

Carter finds a secure port and connects to the network. “Where?” It’s all she can manage, but Ginn shows her the program.

Together they eviscerate it. They lock the air circulators on.

“What else?” Carter’s peripheral vision is gone. She can’t feel anything but the heat of the desert, spread behind her in a broad swath. The shimmer-shine of the air.

She’ll die as she’d always feared.

Alone at a computer terminal.

Responsible for unknown losses.

Ignorant of the fate of her friends.

Buck up, Daniel says, warm and amused.

“The filtration system,” Ginn says.

They restore control.

“What else?” Carter asks, almost blind.

“The power relays on level twenty-eight,” Ginn says.

“What else?” Carter can’t feel her hands.

“The iris,” Ginn says.

“What else?” Carter asks.

“Nothing.” Ginn doubles over, the word a sob. “Nothing else.”

Carter’s hands release and her knees buckle. Ginn’s hand is on her arm, but there’s no support there, just another fall.

Carter lies on her back, her vision a narrowing tunnel.

She hears the air circulators.

“Why?” Carter whispers, looking for Daniel.

“I told you.” Ginn speaks out of the darkness. “We aren’t like you. But I—” she swallows blood. “I know you.” She coughs wetly. “I know you.”

Me too, Daniel kneels over her, in dark profile against the Egyptian sun.

“But the rules,” Carter mouths silently, knowing he’s only a product of her dying mind, knowing Daniel can’t be here; he’s still alive.

Oh yeah, Daniel says, warm breeze, dark outline. You know me. I love rules.

Carter scrabbles for her radio with numb fingers. She has to know if he’s alive. She has to hear his voice. But she can’t unclip it from her belt. Ginn’s fingers find it. Pulls it free. Offer it silently.

“Carter,” Jack says. “Carter, if you’re out there, respond, damn it.”

“Daniel,” she sobs over the priority channel.

She’s never done anything like this. Lost control. Broke radio protocol. But she has to know. She has to know before she dies—

If he’s coming too. Coming with her.

“Sam?!” It’s him. It’s Daniel. Her Daniel Jackson, alive and barely audible over gunfire and shouting.

“I’m with a friendly,” Carter chokes on blood. “Daniel. I’m with a friendly. In LA gear.”

“Where?!”

She has no air left to answer. If Daniel had been here instead of her, everything would have gone differently. He’d have walked out into the corridor, hands extended, expression open, asking nicely, and the universe would have fallen in line.

Or, Daniel counters, eyes too light, too sun-bleached, wearing robes of a color she’d never seen on Abydos, maybe if I’d been here, all the air circulators would have gone offline, and everyone would have died.

“SAM. WHERE.” Daniel’s voice crackles over the radio. The gunfire is quieter now. Like he’s left the firefight, like he got out of the gateroom with charm and luck and guts.

She can’t breathe. She can’t see. She feels bloody fingers wrap over hers. The radio slides free.

“Level twenty-eight,” Ginn rasps.

Her mind unspools. Images come, thick and fast and full of color. Jack on the other side of an ice-blue forcefield bisecting halls of gold. Alien dawns. Earth sunsets. All the machines through all the galaxy she’s touched. The Fifth replicator iteration who had loved her, his eyes dark and full of pain. The light, the song of Orlin, building a stargate in her garage. Around her, every crystal in every piece of recovered tech sings. She hears the gate. The control element at the heart of her dialing program. Every stolen Zat. She hears Jack, the wild, rough song of him. She remembers watching Carl Sagan on her couch at home, her throat shredded with weeping after her mother’s funeral. Over and over and over again the same episode of Cosmos. Space is filled with a network of wormholes. You might emerge somewhere else in space. Somewhen else in time.

She feels desert sun on her face.

The universe is statistical. She’s seen the truth of that. At every point where outcomes are uncertain, all possible events play out along branches in the quantum foam. Fate itself divides. Samantha Carter experiences all that is possible, even if she isn’t aware of it; her consciousness splitting and ending and tracking and reforming until it runs out through threading tributaries and the river of her life rejoins the cosmic ocean.

Can’t get anything by you. Daniel brings the warmth of the star they share.

She knows those other tributaries. She’s seen them with her own eyes. Her hair long, her face full of grief. And always, always, separated from Jack O’Neill.

“I’m sorry,” Ginn whispers, blind to sun and sand.

She can’t speak. She can’t breathe. The crystal in Cheyenne Mountain sings a song she knows. She reaches for it, tries to lift herself into it, but—

Her mind offers her one last burst in the growing dark. Her childhood home, the lights low, the TV on. It’s the night of her mother’s funeral. A warm night wind blows through the screen door. It should be Mark next to her on the couch, but it’s Daniel, stealing a handful of popcorn as Carl Sagan explores the universe in a ship of iridescent light.

“It’s so human.” She’s confused for reasons she doesn’t understand.

“What is?” His eyes hold the desert.

“My life,” she whispers.

He smiles a small smile. “I know. Isn’t it great?”

“Yeah.” She reaches for the bowl.