I'm thinking she probably has a beacon for a tinker teleport that will drop her in the middle of Cheyenne Mountain ("Hey, Daniel, who's the girl messing with the Stargate and making Carter rip her hair out?") and/or an instant pocket dimension panic room button from Toybox, or whatever ever else they can grab to make her safe ("Here's two jetapcks, one to reverse-engineer and one to escape from danger with.").
This comment sparked a silly omake idea and I had to bang it out before I could get anything else done... 
"INCOMING!"
Everyone in the entire yard dropped whatever it was they were doing and bolted for cover without a second thought at the announcement over the intercoms speakers, the word booming out across the bay even as a whistling sound descended on the facility. A massive explosion in the middle of the huge concrete area sent shock waves through the ground, fragments of metal and cement fountaining high into the air, and a large cloud of smoke rolling outwards from the impact site.
Even as this was happening the roofs of two of the smaller warehouses, one on either side of the yard, blew off on explosive bolts, a pair of large oval pods erupting from each building in less than two seconds. As they rose, rotary gun barrels unfolded from the PhalanxCIWS units and slewed onto target, opening up without hesitation and firing thousands of rounds per minute of explosive ammunition out across the water with a deafening roar. Far out over the bay an aircraft exploded into flames, another missile that had launched from it only moments before also being intercepted and destroyed simultaneously.
Before the Protectorate on the Rig or the PRT in the center of the city had the first idea anything was happening, the DWU protective detail had swung into action. More missiles came streaking in from a source over the horizon out to sea, hugging the water at less than twenty meters until they were a kilometer out then rising vertically to drop directly onto the facility. The gun pods kept firing, slewing wildly from side to side in a blur of motion as they neutralized one missile after another.
During all this the well rehearsed evacuation plan was put into action. Every person on site either headed for hardened bunkers excavated deep under the facility and lined with half a meter of the best armor alloy available, capable of tanking a small tactical nuclear weapon even before the local gravitational reference shields had been turned on, or rushed for the hidden stealthed VTOL aircraft that were already standing by in other repurposed warehouses. Heavily armed special forces teams were on the move, both on site and at other locations around the city and the state, all of them heading either to protect the Prime Asset or eliminate whatever the threat was.
Within thirty seconds the entire DWU facility was apparently abandoned. Aircraft launched from their locations carrying the critical personnel and headed due west, going supersonic almost before clearing the buildings and causing shock waves that broke windows across the city. Others headed east with weapons hot, looking for whatever had decided to poke the hornet's nest, while two nuclear submarines that happened to be prowling the coast twenty kilometers off shore began a hunt and destroy mission.
By the time the Rig alarms started blaring, eruptions of blinding light lit the horizon, and alerts had gone through the US government all the way to the top.
As no one yet knew what the real threat was and had to assume none of this would be enough, the worst case order was sent and enacted. Without properly thinking things through, unfortunately, but mistakes happen.
Order One Five Six,
Prime Jumpshift, was triggered.
And Taylor Hebert, who had been heading for the evacuation shuttle, holding her backpack and running after her father and Angus while surrounded by lethal people carrying many weapons, barely had time to look surprised when her emergency teleport beacon activated right as she was turning on one of her scanners with her free hand in an attempt to work out the source of the problems.
In a bright flash of light she disappeared.
The chaos that ensued when she didn't
reappear in the most secure location on the planet, deep under the mountains in Colorado, made the shouting that Director Piggot was producing as she watched her city turn into a combat movie look like
nothing…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Ow."
Taylor rubbed her head, sat up, got halfway and slammed into something far too close with a metallic clang, and recoiled in pain. On the way down again the
back of her head this time smacked into the ground with
another metallic clang, then there was silence.
Which was broken a few seconds later by a faint "Ow" again, this time with feeling.
"What the fuck?" the girl muttered to herself, rubbing her head once more, now in two different places. She not only felt like someone had used her as a baseball bat in a long game, but had a pair of really quite painful spots now, one on her forehead and one on the back of her skull. When the throbbing died down to tolerable levels she very carefully reached up in the darkness she'd suddenly found herself in and felt around. A smooth cold metal surface met her fingertips, making her frown.
Cautiously she ran her hand sideways, finding a corner, which she followed down to a metal floor. Her other hand made a similar discovery in the other direction. She quickly worked out that she appeared to be lying in a somewhat less than a meter square metal box, which was rather odd as it certainly wasn't what she'd expected to find.
Reaching beyond her head only found air, and a questing probe with her feet met the same. So a metal tube at least three meters long, then, rather than a box. Square in section, somewhat thin walls based on how they flexed when she experimentally pushed, and… yes, there was a current of air flowing over her from somewhere past her feet.
"An air duct?" she wondered out loud, very carefully pulling herself up onto her elbows and peering around. She couldn't see any light at all, which was definitely weird but if she really was inside a ventilation system it wasn't surprising.
"Damn teleporting Tinker crap," she grumbled as she checked her pockets, finding everything was there, then felt around to make sure her backpack was also present, which it was. "Targeting is awful. I told them it was a stupid idea, and I could design something to do the job right if they'd just wait a couple of days..." She sighed as she opened her backpack by feel and rummaged around inside, removing a small head mounted flashlight which she immediately strapped on, then activated. Bright white light illuminated pretty much the scene she'd expected to see based on her exploration by touch.
She looked around then sighed again. "Yeah. Ventilation duct. Yay. So if
that way is where the air's coming from, that's probably the surface, so I need to go
this way to get to where I
should have ended up."
The girl pulled out one of her phones and checked the screen, then frowned a little as none of the parahuman scanning programs showed any trace of the subspace anomalies that betrayed the presence of Tinker Tech like she'd been expecting. She fiddled with the settings for a while, then looked intrigued as she got a somewhat different quantum reading that was certainly not something she'd encountered before but shared some slight similarities with the portals she'd been examining for a while now.
"Hmm. I wonder what
that is?" she mumbled, pulling out another phone and turning it on, then checking her readings using a different form of sensor. "High energy density, fluctuations in subspace, but… strange. And inefficient, it's losing nearly thirty percent of the energy as quantum noise. Not really Tinker stuff, but..."
Her mutterings would have sounded both interested and somewhat peeved to any listener, but no one was around to hear. Almost forgetting where she was and why for the moment Taylor dug into her backpack, finding that she could barely sit cross-legged in the large ventilation duct, and pulled out the laptop she'd rebuilt the previous week as a more powerful version of her go-to phone for really serious work away from her home system. It was stuffed with some of her own design of optronic processors she'd been fiddling around with for a while and that she thought Brendan would like when she'd finished. Turning it on she connected both phones to it and started tapping away, examining the resulting data with great curiosity.
"Hmm. Fascinating," she commented a little later, very quietly, as she watched a graph change rapidly over a few seconds, finally spiking into a new configuration with an abrupt shift of power level. "A stable, well stable-
ish, wormhole. Sort of," she said to herself, working out multidimensional equations in her head and fumbling absently for a notebook from her bag. She scribbled for a while, then looked at the results, made some corrections, and nodded. "Yeah. Pretty simple, really. Neat. I didn't think of that, but it's kind of obvious when you look at the Tau-space vectors. Got a lot of places for improvement though… Wonder who made it? And why?"
She looked back at the laptop in time to see the readings drop off, reverting to the previous levels. Noting the time she moved her scanner around to get a bearing on whatever was behind the phenomenon. "About fifty meters down and two hundred that way," she said to herself, looking at one of the walls of the duct and thinking hard. "OK. Find whoever got me into a ventilation system rather than the correct place, kick him in the kneecap and call him an idiot, make sure Dad and Angus are all right, and the other guys, then go and figure out who's built themselves a not very good portal generator, I guess," she decided. Putting everything but one of the phones back into her pack and pockets, she used the remaining device to scan her surroundings, seeing that she was mostly surrounded by rock as she'd expected. The facility was supposed to be underground after all.
Nodding to herself, she shoved the phone into a pocket, got on hands and knees, and carefully crawled off in the direction the air was going, mentally complaining about Tinkers and their pseudo-technology.
Again.
It annoyed her.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
An hour and ten minutes later, Taylor was more than slightly irritated. She was quite peeved and also somewhat worried.
Peering out of a ventilation grille that was some twenty meters above the floor, she watched the people wandering around below her with her eyebrows up. The uniforms were familiar but had a number of differences she could see, and more importantly there were signs in a few places that she'd read through other grilles that were not at all what she'd been expecting.
What, she wondered, was '
Stargate Command'?
It certainly wasn't anything she'd heard of before. Brendan had never mentioned anything like it. And some of the technology she'd seen in another room, which appeared to be a lab, wasn't anything she was familiar with, not to mention quite a lot of it seemed to have a design background that didn't match either Tinker work
or any of the normal sort. Several people had been examining a number of devices that they clearly didn't fully understand the operation of, based on the comments she'd overheard. She'd spend twenty minutes listening to a pair of scientists discussing how one widget, which was obviously a force field generator, actually worked. After only five minutes she was highly tempted to shout down at them that they had the matrix equations entirely wrong and were never going to figure it out without bringing in two more dimensions, but managed to stop herself.
By that point she had a pretty good idea that something peculiar was happening, and decided that being discreet was sensible until she found out what it was. So she'd switched on her optical field diversion generator, and also the sound suppression system she'd recently got working nicely, to avoid discovery.
Right now, though, she was mostly fixated on the big metal ring standing at one end of the room she was far above, with a ramp leading up to it. Examining the device she quickly worked out that the markings around the edges seemed to be some sort of spatial coordinate system, and from that derived the thought that the thing was probably a transportation mechanism of some form. That in turn led her to deduce it was probably the source of the wormhole she'd detected, a supposition that was validated when she carefully scanned it from closer range.
The material the thing was made from wasn't one she'd encountered before but seemed to be a superconductor of some form, and she spent a while pondering on how to make the stuff, writing down a couple of pages of notes for later investigation. She also traced out all the power and data connections from the device, following them through the walls to a control room that was almost directly below her, and a power source that was two floors further down and appeared to be a small fission reactor with some interesting modifications from her readings.
The ring itself had a metal iris, that read as being manufactured from more common materials, primarily a titanium alloy, over the opening in the middle of the toroidal device. Studying this she decided immediately that it was an aftermarket add-on, not part of the original mechanism. It looked very industrial and was clearly the work of a normal engineer, while the rest of the machine was definitely
not that simple. In fact, it was sufficiently different to normal tech that she could see around the place, all of which was basically more or less what she'd expect to see albeit in many ways somewhat dated, that she suspected it wasn't of human manufacture.
It also wasn't the work of any of the alien species she was familiar with either.
So of course she found it immensely interesting.
As she was lying there on her stomach taking notes and scanning everything with several different phones, a klaxon sounded and lights began flashing in the corners of the enormous room. Moments later a voice announced in calm professional tones, "Offworld activation of gate."
She watched, fascinated, as the inner ring section started to rotate with a grinding sound that made her wince slightly and think it needed a bit of decent lubrication. The ring revolved for a few seconds, then stopped, while one of the mechanical latch-type mechanisms around the periphery of the outer ring that she'd been wondering about snapped out a few centimeters, lit up, and snapped back into place.
"Chevron one encoded," the voice said. She worked out that it was coming from a second story booth at the far end of the room, that she could barely make out from her current position and angle, which appeared to have a number of people in it and a lot of computer equipment. Even as the ring began moving again half a dozen armed soldiers ran into the room from doors on both sides near the booth and took up positions, alertly aiming weapons at the machine.
"Chevron two encoded," the man commented, sounding like it was routine. Taylor kept watching carefully while aiming all her sensors at the device.
The latches operated one after another until seven of them were lit. "Chevron seven encoded," the call came, and at the same time there was a loud
whoosh sound from the ring. Blue light, looking like a bright lamp projecting through deep water, rippled across the wall behind the device as the sound died away. After a pause of a few seconds, the announcer said, "Valid SG-1 ID code received. Opening iris."
The metal leaves across the ring slid and rotated out of the way, revealing a large vertical pool of energy that did a decent impression of water impossibly hanging in the middle of the torus, while Taylor inspected it closely and nodded a little to herself.
"Definitely a wormhole," she muttered under her breath, inaudible more than a meter away even without the suppression field. She waited and was rewarded by seeing four people walk out of the interface that was obviously between normal four-space and a higher dimensional conduit, each of them looking around for a moment then proceeding down the ramp to the ground as if they'd got off a commercial flight. It was clearly routine to them. Scanning the ring she measured a number of parameters and made a few notes, just before the wormhole closed and the energy dissipated with a faint rustling sound. The iris closed seconds later.
"Welcome back, SG-1," a different, older voice stated over the intercom. One of the four arrivals, a guy who vaguely reminded her of Brendan although he was somewhat younger, looked up at the window and waved in a sort of lazy salute. "Report to the briefing room as soon as you've unloaded."
"Five minutes, General," the man on the floor called back with a nod, then turned to his companions and said something else too quietly for Taylor to hear. The small group, a blonde woman about her Dad's age, a younger dark-haired man with glasses, and a very tall and solidly built black guy with a strange gold tattoo on his forehead, all followed as their apparent leader headed for one of the exits. She watched as they left the room carrying several bags of something along with their weapons, all four looking rather tired.
The soldiers who had been standing by, and had gone from alert to a more relaxed status when they'd seen who it was, filed out after them. A couple of technicians entered from the other side of the room and spent about ten minutes fiddling with some instrumentation near the base of the ring to the left side, then also vanished again, leaving the portal machine alone. Even the control room had a shutter close over the window.
Eventually Taylor was the only one apparently still watching, although she could see and detect cameras all over the place. Rolling onto her back she lay in the duct staring at the metal above her head, thinking hard.
One thing was abundantly clear to her; She was
not in the place she was supposed to be. In fact she had a very strong suspicion she wasn't even on the same
world she was supposed to be.
Eventually she sighed. "Damn it. This is a pain in the ass. Oh well. New objectives. Find a way home,
then locate the dick who can't send me to the right world never mind the right location, kick him
really fucking hard in the
nuts, find dad, et cetera." The girl shook her head in irritation. "And I was going to a movie with Amy tonight and everything. I'm really not very happy about all this. Someone is going to know about that when I get back."
Grumbling inaudibly and invisibly Taylor put all her stuff into her pockets and backpack, turned around, and headed back down the ventilation system to find somewhere she could have some privacy to work on a method to get home. On the way, she took a detour back to one of the labs she'd passed, hoping it was now empty so she could
borrow some of the more useful bits and pieces she'd need.
Luckily it was, so that was handy.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Some hours later Taylor nodded to herself in satisfaction. She'd found a store room a couple of floors down from the ring room, one filled with spare parts for all manner of hardware, along with enough emergency rations to keep an Endbringer shelter stocked for a month, and had commandeered it as a private workspace. Having bypassed the locks and alarms without trouble, and rerouted the camera system to ignore her little hideaway, she'd taken the opportunity to investigate one of the boxes of rations and see if they were reasonably edible. As it turned out the things weren't actually bad at all, so she'd eaten her fill, drunk some of the bottled water she'd also located, then relaxed for a while to think hard.
While she relaxed she idly used some of the spare computer gear, which was somewhat out of date as far as she was concerned but still usable, to put together a basic console that monitored the security camera network including the ones she'd bypassed, so she could keep an eye on both the ring room and any approach to her current location. It was obvious she was in a military area, and she was fairly sure that the people running the place wouldn't be all that happy about her sudden appearance in their midst. She really didn't want to get involved in having to explain things to a bunch of paranoid military people if she could avoid it. Far better to quietly arrange a trip home without bothering anyone else in her view.
As far as she could tell no one had been into this store room for months at least. The dust had been thick on everything, with no footprints visible on the floor, and with a little luck she could get her work done without anyone noticing. The main reactor was at the other end of the floor she was on and far enough away that anyone working on it should be unlikely to pass by. Even so, she'd locked the door and made sure to override any external controls by physically disconnecting them.
No sense taking chances.
When she'd digested her snack, and had time to think things through, she spent a while making notes on her observations and thoughts about her current location, how she got here, and ideas on how to reverse whatever the idiotic Tinker widget had done when it went wrong. She was almost certain that the root cause of her unexpected world jump was down to an interaction between the teleportation beacon doing something stupid with subspace right at the critical moment when the alien ring upstairs had
also done something stupid with subspace, in a different but related manner. Somehow they'd ended up interacting through a quantum locking process and diverted her teleport to here rather than her original destination. It was quite likely that this facility was physically located very close in
this world to where she should have ended up in her own world which would have made such an interaction more feasible. Even so the timing must have been ridiculously improbable to allow such a thing to happen.
Before she got into the real work, she turned her attention to the equipment she'd acquired in her little scavenging operation. The lab had been empty and it had been a simple matter to bypass the alarms there as well. A bit of work with some of the gear she'd had with her and she'd arranged a small antigravity device that allowed her to gently float down to the floor, hovering just above it in case of any pressure pads she'd missed, then float back up to the duct when she'd finished borrowing a few useful items.
Some parts, a few tools, and one or two widgets she'd spotted that looked like they'd come in handy, or were just interesting to study.
Like that shield generator.
Now, she turned the thing over in her hands, wishing she was in her own lab to properly examine it. Still, she'd make do. It was clearly of alien manufacture although, interestingly, not from the same source as the ring. After a couple of minutes she'd worked out how to disassemble it and quickly had it in bits on top of a crate she'd repurposed as a workbench, her head light balanced on another small box she'd put next to her head and aimed downwards so she could see it properly. The store room wasn't all that well lit, which was annoying.
"Ah. I see..." Taylor nodded thoughtfully as she probed the inside of the machine, delicately moving optical components around with the end of a pair of tweezers while making notes with her other hand without looking at the pen. "Clever. So this must be a multiphase strong force interactor… Yeah. Huh. Bit like Leet's thing, but better designed. Not quite as efficient but a lot more reliable. And this is… OK, power supply here, control circuits here, output wave shaper
here. And..."
She cocked her head and peered at the innards of the device. "
That's not right," she mumbled, leaning closer and sniffing. "Burned out one of the subspace fluctuation nodes. Overloaded or bad design?" Prodding a few other places, she frowned thoughtfully. "Both. Bad design making it overload," she finally decided. "Overcomplicated, too." Reaching for her toolkit she started reworking the circuit. "I can just reroute this, bypass that section, add a link from here to here..."
Twenty minutes passed in mostly silence with a few clinking sounds of tools, some almost subvocal muttering, and a couple of faint zapping noises. One of which was followed by a yelp and some swearing. Eventually she sat back on the small box she was using as a chair, feeling pleased. "Great. That should do it. Add one of my power units right
here..." Taylor spent a little longer connecting up a device of her own manufacture she pulled out of her backpack, carefully documented everything she'd done and deduced, took a number of close up photos for future reference, then reassembled the alien device.
Picking it up she moved to the end of the room near the door and put it on the floor, then knelt down and tapped a couple of places on the outer shell of the roughly egg-shaped machine. It made a soft chiming sound then started humming very quietly at a low pitch. Nodding with a smile, she stood up, looked around, and retrieved one of the field ration packs from the crate she'd opened. Tossing it towards the door she looked satisfied when there was a pop and a shimmering green force-field appeared for a second, the pack bouncing off it and dropping to the floor.
"That'll do it," she told herself happily as she turned and headed back to her improvised workbench. "Just in case."
Soon she was deeply involved in calculating exactly how the alien transportation device had screwed with her emergency teleport and how to reverse the process. If it hadn't been for her worry about her father and friends, she'd have quite enjoyed the work. As it was, it was interesting but annoying too.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Doctor Lee walked into his lab talking to Doctor Felger, the pair having a good natured argument about the physics of faster than light travel, and headed to the bench where their latest investigative project was. Reaching it he kept talking for a moment while putting his hand on the machine, only to realize as he instead found himself touching the bench surface that something was wrong.
He looked down.
"What the hell?" he muttered in surprise, as he stared at the absence of mysterious alien hardware, then looked around. "Did you put it back in the secure store area?" he asked, turning to the other man, who was sitting in front of the whiteboard they'd been working out some calculations on, inspecting them thoughtfully.
"What?" Felger asked absently, leaning forward and correcting one of the equations, then scratching his nose with the wrong end of the marker without thinking about it.
"The device! Did you put it away before we went for lunch?" Bill prodded more urgently, already hurrying over to the high security storeroom on the other side of the lab where they kept things the various field teams brought back for examination. He punched in a long code from memory and put his palm on the scanner, then yanked the door open without waiting for an answer. Going into the smaller room he looked around, then froze in horror, before turning on the spot.
"Oh
shit," he murmured, rapidly exiting the storeroom to find his colleague staring at the workbench.
"Hey, where's the device?" Felger asked indignantly, not apparently aware that the end of his nose was now bright green. "We were working on that!"
"I know, you idiot, it's
gone! And so are half a dozen other devices from the secure storage area," Lee shouted. "And… where the hell is my portable oscilloscope?" Pointing at the bench he added, "Half the component bins are empty too!"
They exchanged a glance then looked carefully around once more, trying to find any of the missing equipment. No sign of it was apparent and there wasn't a trace of where it could have gone. "Nothing on the security system," Felger reported while Lee was trying to work out precisely what was missing. The mysterious widget that SG-3 had brought back a week ago was the largest item, but there were several other things that were awaiting inspection which had somehow vanished, representing years of research.
"Oh, god, this is going to get loud," Lee moaned when they were completely certain none of the various things were anywhere in the lab. They exchanged worried glances before quickly leaving, locking the lab again, and heading off to find the right person to mention that somehow the most secure research area in the facility had somehow been robbed.
They were right. It did get loud.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Eventually Taylor worked out that her unexpected arrival here, wherever '
here' really was, appeared to be down to a one in a billion chance interaction between the '
star gate' machine upstairs, the emergency teleporter that had been extracting her from the DWU, most likely a power surge caused by random noise in the wormhole the alien device produced, and pure bad luck. All exacerbated by this place being physically located in an exact analogue position to her original destination in her own world. It was pretty much what she'd guessed would be the case, but she now had the math to prove it.
Putting her pen down she flexed her hand, then picked up the notebook and read the last fifteen pages of equations carefully to make sure there were no mistakes. Satisfied she'd covered everything, she turned to her laptop and started working on a method to reverse the process and get home.
It was going to need a specially designed version of the wormhole generator, or modifications to the original one. As she highly doubted that they'd let her play around with their wormhole machine, at least without being
very difficult about things for some time, she sighed and began designing a much smaller one she could build from available parts. Luckily for her purposes it didn't need to be anything like as large as that other machine, and only needed one purpose, so pretty much the entire targeting system could be omitted and the power requirements would be much simpler.
Plus she could make it a lot more efficient in the process which would help quite a bit.
After a few hours work and some more of the rations she had a decent design worked out. It suffered from not having enough time spent on it to really refine the thing to the level she'd have liked, and it irked her professional pride to make something so crude, but it should suffice for her purposes. After all it only needed to work once and if she needed another one she could sit down and do it properly once she was home. The basic principle was simple enough and she could see several places the implementation could be significantly improved. And it had taught her a few neat tricks she hadn't thought of to date, so all in all this whole thing wasn't a complete waste of time.
She was still worried about her father though, and wanted to get home as fast as possible.
Leaving the program she'd written to calculate the correct parameters for the return wormhole, which would require very specific configuration, to run in the background, she turned her attention to the teleport beacon. The calculations would take several hours even with the speed of her laptop so she should have enough time to modify the thing, then build the rest of the stuff she needed. The beacon, some of the equipment she'd acquired in that lab along with parts she had in her own kit, and other odds and ends she'd found around this store room should be enough to do the job.
Shortly she was happily engaged in building an improvised wormhole generator, whistling softly to herself as she listened to a recording of her alien tutors on the headphones she'd pulled out of her backpack.
Things, while annoying, could have been worse.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"We've got a big problem, General," Sam told the man, who was listening intently with a frown on his face. "The unknown device SG-3 discovered on P9I-314 has disappeared, and not only that, seven other devices awaiting investigation have vanished from the secure storage room in Lab 9. Along with quite a lot of electronic components, wire, connectors, and other parts."
"There's no chance it's simply an accounting error?" the general asked.
"No, the device was definitely there before Doctors Lee and Felger left for lunch four hours ago, and it was missing when they came back forty five minutes later, as were the other items." Sam shook her head. "We've checked the security footage, and there's no sign of any intruder, but when I investigated further I discovered that the camera network had been bypassed at some point in the last twelve hours. Very carefully and expertly."
"So someone inside the base has stolen classified equipment," he said heavily.
"That's the only conclusion I can come to, sir," she replied. "No one has entered the base via the topside elevator since the main shift came in this morning. The gate has only been used four times in that period, twice for us, once for SG-6 outbound, and once for SG-2 inbound. So it seems unlikely that the perpetrator has recently arrived. Either we've got an intruder with serious abilities in theft who somehow managed to get into one of the most secure bases on the planet without a trace, or it was an inside job."
"Do we know exactly what was taken?" he asked. She nodded, handing him a clipboard.
"We ran a complete inventory of the lab, and that's a list of everything that's vanished."
He examined the list, then asked, "Could any of this be used to build a weapon? Or for that matter,
be a weapon?"
"I don't know, sir. On the face of it, I'd say it was unlikely, but we don't actually
know what four of the devices do. The largest one is the P9I-314 device. No one is sure who made it, what it does, or how it works. SG-3 found it in the wreckage of a crashed ship of unknown provenance, which had apparently been there for probably six to seven hundred years and had been almost entirely stripped centuries ago. The thing was buried under some rocks near the crash site, they thought it had probably been ejected from the ship during the crash and they literally found it by accident."
She retrieved the clipboard and went through the list. "We're also missing a broken zat gun, a completely depleted ZPM, something that's most likely a communications device of some form, what
might be a sensor system, two examples of what we suspect are a type of computer processor, part of a power supply from an Ancient shuttlecraft, and a spherical device made of a material we can't identify or even scratch. We haven't got the faintest idea what
that does. If anything. Plus some tools, a quantity of fairly prosaic parts and random hardware, some spools of wire, and a few other small items of that nature. My guess is that either someone was after something specific in that collection and took the rest so we wouldn't know what they really wanted, or it was someone who simply grabbed everything they could identify as off world tech. If it was that I don't know
why they'd steal the other things."
General Hammond regarded her for a few seconds, then looked at the other three members of SG-1 who had been listening silently, letting her explain the situation. "Damn it," he finally said quietly. "This isn't good."
"No, sir," Jack agreed. "I've ordered the base locked down already, but you may want to take other steps. We need to find whoever it is and figure out who they're working for. We might have a Goa'uld infiltrator, or the NID are sneaking around. Or both."
"Or worse," Daniel muttered.
"Indeed," Teal'c intoned, his impassive face showing a hint of concern.
"Bypassing the cameras would take someone with some serious expertise," Sam added. "And quite a lot of inside knowledge. It's possible that it's the work of more than one person. We still can't figure out
how they managed to access the system either. There's no trace in the logs. It's almost impressive but it's also deeply worrying."
"Run a check on the other labs, the armory, and anything else critical," Hammond ordered after some more thought. He sat down behind his desk and regarded them. "Lock down the gate room, no one goes in or out until we get to the bottom of this. Jack, put some teams together and sweep the base for anything at all that doesn't look right. We need to find those devices and whoever took them. Hopefully they're still here."
"It's unlikely that anyone could have left without us noticing, sir," Jack said.
"It's unlikely that anyone could have
entered without us noticing, but that might just have happened," Hammond replied. O'Neill thought then nodded reluctantly.
"Good point."
Picking up one of the phone handsets on his desk, Hammond went on, "I'll need to make some calls. Find this person or persons."
"Sir," Jack responded, before they all left the office. Moments later the general started dialing the first number, wondering what the latest problem would turn out to be and dreading the answer.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"OK, that looks pretty good," Taylor murmured as she studied the results of her work so far. She hoped the military guys here wouldn't be too upset about her repurposing some of the random crap they had lying about. Most of the computer gear and other electronics seemed pretty old so surely it wasn't worth much anyway, and she had a good idea that the alien tech was something they'd found rather than acquired normally too. From what she'd overheard it was clear that their scientists didn't have a clue about the broken shield generator, so maybe they'd be pleased she'd fixed it? Even if she'd kind of blocked off this room
using the now-functional and somewhat improved device.
Meh. Getting home was important, and she'd leave them some notes on how the thing worked, which should cheer them up after she left.
Probably.
Idly wondering what the purpose of this place other than scavenging broken alien tech was, which admittedly was a cool hobby, she hummed to herself as she added some more focusing elements to the main punchthrough array and carefully aligned them. The machine she was building was about half completed now, standing not quite a meter high and sitting on a chassis that had originally been a field radio pack. She'd pulled a few useful elements out of some of the other tech she'd found, having smiled widely at the sensor block when she'd fully identified what it was as it was exactly the sort of thing she could use for the targeting mechanism of her machine. In the storeroom she'd poked through it had looked interesting so she'd acquired it in case it came in handy and was pleased to see that her initial thoughts were correct.
She also wondered where it had come from. It looked an awful lot like something you'd use in a spacecraft of some sort. Did these guys have spacecraft?
Taylor shrugged. Maybe she could find out later, but she needed to get home first.
The damaged power unit that looked very old and not quite as well made as it should have been had been useless as it stood, but had rewarded her with a number of helpful components that she'd used in conjunction with one of her own power units to make something capable of driving her machine. Currently it was hooked up to the depleted energy storage unit she'd puzzled over for half an hour while figuring out how it worked, and was slowly recharging the thing, which she was going to use to create the initial subspace energy burst to generate the wormhole she required. The ring upstairs was, according to her readings, not set up to do what she needed and having thought about it during the construction of this smaller version she'd come to the conclusion would probably take too much power to do the job in any case.
Sure, she
could modify the thing given time, but making one from scratch that was tailored specifically for interdimensional wormholes rather than a simple spatial link was a lot more efficient and faster.
Sitting back on her heels she examined the results of a few hours work, silently bemoaning the lack of time to do a good job. It would probably burn something out pretty quickly but that couldn't be helped, and it wasn't like she needed it to work for all that long anyway. Making some more notes on her progress, she checked how the battery charger was coming along, then tweaked the power source a little to make the process more effective. The battery widget was also clearly extremely old and she was going slowly since she didn't entirely trust it after however long it had been since it was made.
Flipping back through pages and pages of diagrams, she muttered, "Yeah, should be easy enough to make one of those at home too if I need it. The power supply isn't worth doing, that sensor unit is pretty good and I'll bet Brendan would like it, and these computer cores are interesting." She picked up one of the two cubical crystalline devices she'd scavenged and studied it again. "Optronic processing nodes and lots of molecular storage. Not bad at all. I wonder who made them? They sure know their stuff."
Annoyed that she didn't have a good microscope handy to properly examine the devices, she put the notebook down and picked up the other identical device, weighing them in her hands for a moment. Eventually she shrugged and put one of them into her backpack. "One for them, one for me. Seems fair enough, I'm leaving them a working shield generator."
Taylor grinned a little, feeling somewhat guilty but not letting it stop her. They'd obviously acquired the things up themselves via non-conventional means and perhaps her notes would help them work the devices out. Putting the other one down she wiped hair out of her eyes and got back to work.
Two more hours passed mostly in silence, as she happily constructed her path home and listened to music, pausing every now and then to take a drink of water. The guts of the communication unit and some sort of energy gun which she stripped for parts having worked out what it was and how it did its thing were added to the machine, and copious quantities of notes were written. She had to pause to retrieve another notebook as she'd filled the first one, taking the opportunity to nibble another ration bar and wonder if she could find a toilet somewhere. Rather distastefully she'd used one of the empty buckets she'd discovered in some cleaning supplies for the basic biological functions, this now being as far away from her as she could put it, but she was wishing she had access to proper facilities.
Unfortunately leaving this room was probably unwise, she decided, and resigned herself to roughing it for now.
Eventually she finished the machine and sat cross-legged in front of it, yawning deeply as she smiled at the result of a lot of hard work. It was crude, yes, not up to her standards, yes, and undoubtedly had a short usable life, yes, but on the other hand it would do the job.
She hoped.
Hopping to her feet she went back to her laptop and checked on the progress of the calculations. It was coming along well but still needed quite a while more before she'd have the final solution matrix. Tired but accepting, hiding her worry about her father and friends, she sighed a little and went back to her machine to see how the battery charging was coming along.
"Hmm, about… maybe fifteen percent now?" she mused quietly as she looked at the screen of one of her phones that she was using as a control node for the process. "Getting there. Probably need about forty percent to do a clean dimensional punchout. Fifty to be sure. Oh well." Shrugging she got another phone and connected it to the wormhole machine then sat on the floor to run diagnostics and make sure the thing was fully operational.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Anything?" Jack asked as he stopped next to Sergeant Wilman, who was leading one of the search teams. The younger man, heavily built with scarred hands, shook his head.
"Nothing so far, sir. We've swept levels one down to sixteen, every room, corridor, lab, you name it. Even shoved Collins into the vents to make sure nothing was in them." He gestured to the short, slender, and annoyed looking female soldier on the other side of the corridor. She was absolutely filthy, covered in dust and cobwebs, and looked ready to kill someone. "We checked in the underfloor cable runs, scanned the elevator shafts, looked in all the store rooms and cupboards… Not a sign of either an intruder or the missing hardware. None of the other teams have found anything either as far as I know."
Jack sighed with a nod. "No, no one's reported back anything useful. Well, nothing to do but keep going. Carry on, Sergeant."
"Sir." The man nodded respectfully and returned to his squad, who were carrying tools and a lot of equipment along with their weapons and seemed both tired and pissed off. Jack sympathized as he was both himself.
He headed off to see if Sam or the rest of his team had managed to figure out what was going on, or had a bright idea. Considering their history it was entirely feasible. As he walked he wondered which one of their enemies was behind all this and how they'd pulled it off. His money was on either the NID, or the Goa'uld, somehow.
How he didn't have a clue.
Which was amazingly irritating. He
hated it when people managed to pull off an operation like this against his people.
They were the ones supposed to be doing that to
other people...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Thirty one percent. Not bad, we're getting there," Taylor mumbled as she checked the charging progress. Her dimensional calculations were also showing they only had a few hours left to run, so hopefully she'd be home soon and looking for a fucking Tinker who didn't know what he was doing with a hot soldering iron in her hand.
It was fair to say her normally sunny disposition had been somewhat soured by this entire adventure. In some ways it was fun, true enough, and she'd learned quite a few things that could be useful, but she'd have liked a bit of warning. She had barely the essentials with her, and the longer she was out of touch with her father the more worried she got.
The girl sighed and went back to examining the spherical thing she'd found in the storeroom, wondering what on earth it was and what the hell it was made of. The dull gray metallic substance was unlike anything she'd ever seen before and was implausibly heavy, not to mention impossibly hard. Not even a small cutting beam tool she'd cobbled together out of spare parts could mark it, or even warm it up, which was odd.
Eventually she sighed again and put it to one side. Deciding that she might as well find out more about what this place actually
was she looked around, then up at the ceiling, a thoughtful expression now present. Those cables up there looked a lot like a network connection…
Half an hour later she was floating just under the ceiling by means of her improvised antigravity unit, having made a mental note to make a better one when she got home since flying was a hell of a lot of fun. No wonder Vicky loved doing it. As she listened to a fast classical track that her mother had loved she carefully probed the cables, looking for one that was connected to something interesting.
It took her a while but in the end she managed to locate a suitable cable and followed it around the ceiling to an appropriate point, then very gently but quite quickly removed the insulation from the wiring and spread the bare wires out, making sure not to break them or let them touch each other. It didn't take long to tap into the network after that, a long cable dangling down from the ceiling to her ad-hoc workbench and connected to one of the phones, which then passed the data link across to her laptop. Minimizing the ongoing calculation program she started working on breaking into the facility's computer network, while feeling both a little guilty again and just a tiny bit gleeful.
It was more fun that it probably should have been, cracking their encryption. Which turned out to be a lot easier than she'd expected. Making some notes on how to improve the system that she could leave them, she went back to work and was soon trawling through some very intriguing documentation on various servers.
"Wow. These guys are
cool," she said softly, watching a video of an operation on another planet half way across the galaxy. "Kind of daft sometimes, but cool even so."
The girl settled down to find out more about Stargate Command and their ongoing mission to annoy every alien species they ran into, a task at which they appeared to be remarkably effective.
She decided their adventures would probably make a really neat TV show.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"We've checked everything from the surface down to the this level, General," O'Neill informed his superior. "So far nothing has been found out of place. No personnel are missing, everyone who had access to Lab 9 has been accounted for and checks out negative for Goa'uld symbiotes, mind control, external influences, or spylike tendencies."
General Hammond raised an eyebrow at this last one, making Daniel cough slightly as he suppressed a laugh and Sam look amused for a moment.
"I see," the older man replied after a moment. "So we have no leads."
"Not yet, no, sir," Jack grumbled. "I can't guarantee that someone's not on the take, but we can't find proof of it if they are. I still think the NID is behind it, those bastards are
sneaky bastards, but I'm damned if I can figure out how they did it."
"It might not be them, Colonel," Sam pointed out. He gave her a look.
"It's almost
always them, Carter."
"Well… I have to admit they do seem to get involved in a lot more of our problems than I like, I'll agree," she finally and a little reluctantly admitted.
"Someone should have shut them down properly," Jack complained. "I'm tempted to do it myself."
"Please don't, Colonel," Hammond sighed. "We don't need the stress. And right now I'm more interested in how our thief managed to do what they did, and where they are. Unless they can teleport or something of that nature they have to still be here
somewhere."
"Perhaps the Asgard were involved?" Teal'c suggested. Everyone else looked at him. The Jaffa returned their gazes evenly. "They do indeed have the ability to teleport."
"Sure, but if Thor wanted anything from us, he'd just ask," Jack pointed out. "He's cool that way."
Teal'c inclined his head in agreement after a moment's thought. "Agreed."
"I think it's highly unlikely the Asgard would be sneaking around lifting our discoveries, General," Daniel put in. "Jack's right, they'd just ask us if they really needed or wanted something we'd found. And with the gate locked out and all outside access cut off, it's pretty much certain that our friend is still here
somewhere. Unless they can turn invisible they'd never get past the guards."
"Wouldn't be the first time," Jack muttered.
"But we have defenses against that sort of thing now, so it's unlikely," Sam said. "I agree, they're still here, whoever it is. And there's only four floors to go. The lower floor is entirely support plant and sewage treatment facilities so that's pretty unlikely to be where they are, the next one up is power distribution and backup air filtration plus some storage of non critical supplies, then it's the reactor floor, and finally the server section. The bulk of the server floor is flooded with nitrogen as a fire suppressant most of the time so that's not going to be usable either. It doesn't leave all that many places for someone to hide."
"I suppose nothing has turned up on any of the internal camera or security grids?" Hammond asked.
She shook her head. "No, sir. I've written some new security programs which have been running diagnostics on the entire system for hours and nothing at all seems to be amiss. None of the motion triggers have tripped, all the door alarms are green, nothing." Sam looked around at them, then back at the general. "I can't explain it. In theory the system is impenetrable but clearly whoever it is has found some way around all our precautions. It's
got to be someone with years of espionage training and probably a lot of experience with this sort of operation. Quite likely some off world tech helping them too, I think."
"And we still don't know
why they took any of the samples or equipment," the older man half-stated, half-questioned. "If it was a deliberate theft of one or more specific items that points to one motive, if it was grabbing everything in sight that was easily taken that could be a different one..."
"The amount of effort required to steal
any of it with the defenses we have suggests it was a very deliberately targeted operation," Daniel commented. "Who's going to put in that much work, maybe years of training, just to walk off with a random pile of artifacts? I can't help thinking they were after one specific thing and everything else is to throw us off the scent somehow."
"Still doesn't make sense," Jack growled. "They took equipment which was actively being worked on, so it was noticed almost immediately. If they can walk through our security that easily it would have been better to lift something that was in storage. We might not have worked
that out for days."
"When we catch them you can ask," Hammond responded. He looked at Sam again. "Do you have any other ideas on how we might trace the perpetrator, Major? You often come up with off the wall plans."
She shook her head slightly, visibly wracking her mind for something she'd missed. "Not really, sir, I've tried everything I could think of. About the only thing left is..."
The blonde woman stopped talking and her eyes widened slightly.
"
There it is," Jack said smugly, pointing. "She's figured something out."
"Power. If they're hiding somewhere they might be using power from the electrical grid," Sam said slowly as she thought hard. "Lights, ventilation, something like that. Most of the places someone could hide would normally be dark and have the ventilation fans turned off since they're not needed if no one is using empty rooms. We might be able to locate a room with higher power consumption than it should have..."
Sam turned on her heel and left Hammond's office nearly at a run. Everyone else exchanged looks then followed.
They found her in one of the computer labs, typing rapidly on a keyboard while watching several large monitors covered in virtual gauges and various graphs.
"Wha'cha doing, Carter?" Jack said calmly as he stopped next to her.
"This is the base power distribution SCADA control interface," she replied absently as she kept working, the rest gathering around her along with a couple of the technicians who were present and were watching curiously. "The last upgrade when we uprated the reactor added some very fine grained power monitoring functions to the power grid, to improve efficiency among other things, and in theory it's got enough resolution to let me..." Her voice trailed off as she worked, peering at the monitors with intent. No one said anything for a few minutes. Windows came and went and graphs danced around, Sam asking a couple of short questions of one tech once or twice, until she suddenly stopped and pointed.
"There. Storage room J8-201 is drawing nearly two hundred watts from the grid, but it's supposed to be locked. The lights should be off and nothing in there is powered up. Standby power on the ventilators is only about sixty watts at most, so
something's not right. I'm guessing the lights are on in that room."
She turned to the techs. "Bring up the cameras for that sector," she snapped.
They worked fast, a grid of dozens of camera views popping up on another monitor. Everyone watched as the man operating the other computer paged through four sets of cameras, many of which were only showing monochrome images clearly illuminated purely by IR lights. Most were of empty corridors and rooms.
"Nothing showing, Major," the man on the right said, looking at her. "The cameras in J8-201 indicate the lights are out and there's no motion inside the room, or nearby."
She looked at the monitor in front of him, then back at the ones she was sitting next to. "The power draw is real, so I'm guessing the camera views
aren't," she finally said, spinning the chair around to regard the general and her team. "I think our visitor is in that room."
"Good enough for me," Jack said. "Let's go ask some questions."
He headed for the door with the rest of SG-1 following, waving at a nearby squad of soldiers as he turned right. Hammond watched them go, looked back at the monitors, then shook his head as he went after them.
He was curious to know who was behind all this, and not really very happy about it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Chuckling at the after-action report she was reading, Taylor shook her head with amusement. That SG-1 team was
hilarious sometimes. The report read like a good novel more than a military operation. Snickering at the dry but clearly rather sarcastic writing that was someone's idea of how to write a report she thought that Amy would probably love it too.
These people were really cool but really crazy, in her opinion. And had a very unusual idea of how you went about doing things. Mind you, she wasn't precisely one to talk in that area according to some people…
Closing the document she poked around some more, finding a number of entertaining and interesting things in their system. They seemed to have run into a surprisingly large number of aliens, who seemed to be all over the damn place out there, and many of them were nearly as bizarre as the Stargate people were. She was also forming the opinion that some of the aliens were also highly irresponsible, leaving dangerous technology all over the place without any safety precautions. Her dad would probably find the entire thing worthy of comment.
The DWU was pretty keen on safety, and took a dim view of people who didn't pay attention to it.
And of course
some of the aliens were just
unpleasant. Those '
Goa'uld' things seemed like they were a pain in the ass and really deserved everything these guys did to them. The Asgard sounded interesting though, although she had a feeling that there was likely to be an issue with how they were doing their cloning. The images she'd found combined with things Amy had told her made her suspicious that they were doing something wrong.
Oh well. That was something to think about later.
Getting up and grabbing a bottle of water, she unscrewed the top and sipped from it while she wandered over to check the charging progress. "Sixty percent. Excellent, more than enough," she smiled. Her program had another half hour or so to go, and she had plenty of power available now. She should be home soon.
The girl walked around the room for a few minutes, stretching her legs and working out the kinks, then went back to her computer. On the way she glanced at the improvised camera control console and stopped dead when she saw about twenty heavily armed people sneaking along a corridor a couple of hundred meters away on the same floor, heading in her direction.
"Whoops," she said with a slightly embarrassed feeling. "Guess they worked out I'm here. I wonder how?"
She looked around, then up, before sighing. "Of course. Power consumption. Didn't think of that. Oh well, nothing for it, I suppose."
Taylor finished the water then put the empty bottle down on a crate before walking over to the shield generator and bending over it. "Yep, this is working fine. OK, that's good enough for now. Bet they're going to get difficult though." She shrugged a little to herself as she straightened up and went back to watch the inbound strike team creep along the corridor, sitting down on a crate and relaxing. Until her calculations were finished she couldn't do much else and if nothing else this might be interesting.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Daniel, zat in hand, watched with the others as the two point men crept forward and arranged themselves on either side of the door to room J8-201. According to the manifests they'd dug out the room was full of mostly innocuous supplies ranging from toilet paper to computer parts, with nothing particularly dangerous present. No one seemed to have entered it according to the logs for at least nine months, although considering that the logs didn't show anyone had entered it
at all he wasn't taking that as gospel.
Hopefully their mysterious thief wasn't holed up with something like a crew served machine gun right on the other side of the door waiting for them…
The two soldiers carefully studied the door, then while one of them covered his companion, the other bent over the lock and carefully tapped in the code. The lock beeped and indicated with a green light that it was now open. Both men got ready and looked at Jack, who waved them into action.
"As soon as they're in, the rest of Team A follow, Team B holds back in case we have trouble, got it?" he said in a low voice at the same time. A chorus of affirmative murmurs came back from the other people waiting for the breaching team to get the door out of the way.
The pair took a step back, side by side and weapons ready, then charged the unlocked door and kicked it open.
Unfortunately, the door itself didn't cooperate with the plan regardless of the lock status and both of them slammed into it very hard with grunts of pain then slid down into untidy heaps on the floor.
Jack put his hand over his eyes and sighed. "Way to make us embarrassed, guys," he groaned.
"It's still locked, Colonel," one of the two said painfully. "Lock reads open."
"So someone jammed it on the inside," O'Neill grumbled. "And now they know we're here. Wonderful. Fine, whatever. Breaching charge."
"Sir." The first soldier climbed to his feet, wincing slightly, and hauled his friend up too. Thirty seconds later they'd attached small charges to the lock mechanism and both hinges points and armed them, small red lights blinking on the black disks as they retreated along with everyone else around the corner.
The man with the remote detonator looked at Jack, who covered his ears and nodded. A click of the trigger was instantly followed by a very loud bang and dust floated down around them as the floor shuddered. The explosives man peered around the corner. "Door's down, Colonel."
"Right. Same plan as before, Team A goes in and B holds back," Jack sighed. He waved his weapon at the corridor. "Go on then, let's get on with this."
He and Teal'c went after the pair who ran down the hallway and dived through the door, while Sam looked at Daniel who shrugged, then followed her as she headed the same way. A couple more soldiers brought up the rear with the other squad taking up defensive positions behind them.
"Lie on the floor, hands on your head!" The shout from inside the room made Sam and Daniel jog forward and enter the room through the smoking remains of the doorway. Both of them stopped and looked at the sight of Jack, Teal'c, and the first pair of soldiers aiming weapons at the…
Teenaged girl sitting on a crate watching them with an interested expression?
What?
Sam exchanged a glance with Daniel, then both of them moved slightly to the side to get a better view.
"Wow, that was really loud," the girl said admiringly. "Nice rolls, too. Just like a movie. You guys are
cool."
She didn't sound all that worried. Which was weird.
"On the ground
now!" Jack ordered. He looked puzzled but determined. Teal'c was pointing his staff weapon roughly in her direction but was frowning slightly. The soldiers accompanying them seemed confused although that didn't stop them covering the girl.
Daniel studied her. She looked human enough, and probably around fifteen or sixteen, tall and slender with long curly black hair and glasses over bright green eyes glinting with intelligence and a certain amount of amusement.
He was getting a very odd vibe about this whole situation…
Looking past her he studied the scene. The larger crate next to her held a number of things including what seemed to be a very high end laptop with the biggest screen he'd ever seen on such a thing, as well as a quantity of other devices he couldn't quite make out from here. Nearby was a… machine.
He tilted his head and inspected the thing. About a meter tall, roughly in the shape of a torus on its side sitting on a short plinth, which seemed to be made out of an old field radio, and covered with neat wiring and glowing components, some of which seemed to be technology he recognized as Ancient, some Asgard, some normal human tech, and a few things he'd never seen before. Following the cabling that was plugged into the base of the machine across the floor about two meters his eyes widened when he saw what they were connected to.
A ZPM.
A
functioning ZPM. It was glowing happily and was obviously not fully depleted like the manifest had claimed. Next to it was a chunk of machinery that looked an awful lot like parts of a zat mated to some more Ancient hardware and a collection of other stuff he couldn't put a name to.
He looked back at the girl. She smiled at Jack. "Sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, and I'll be gone soon."
"If you don't get on the floor we'll have no choice but to put you there," his friend snapped, still aiming his weapon at her, although he looked uncertain. Daniel knew why, the man really didn't like threatening kids. Even ones who unexpectedly popped up in possibly the most secret facility in the US.
"Well, I guess you could try," the girl replied, watching him for a moment then looking back at the screen of her laptop. She picked up one of the smaller devices which also had a colorful display on it and glanced at the screen. "Hold on, this is nearly full now."
She got up and walked over to the machine.
"Stop or we'll put you down," Jack yelled. The girl knelt next to the ZPM. "Jackson!"
Rather reluctantly Daniel aimed his zat at her, popping the weapon into its active mode, and pulled the trigger. The characteristic sound of the discharge was followed immediately by a vaguely musical thump as the crackling bolt of energy stopped dead about three meters into the room, a wall of faint green light flashing into existence for a second.
Everyone stared in shock. The girl looked over her shoulder, smiled at them, and went back to poking the device connected to the ZPM. "Just about full now," he heard her mutter as she did something to it.
"That's impossible," Sam said under her breath. Daniel looked at her to see her staring not at the apparent force-field, but the ZPM. "That was completely depleted. How can it be full?"
"I charged it up," the girl commented as she disconnected the lump of hardware that was plugged into the crystalline artifact. "I need a big power surge and this thing should do the job nicely." A ping from her laptop made her look over, then stand up. "Finally. That took longer than I thought it would." She sounded somewhat irked as she walked back to the large crate and peered at the screen.
Jack took aim off to the side and fired his sidearm. The report of the pistol echoed around the room and the force-field flickered briefly. Everyone watched an expended round drop to the floor.
"Ow. That's very loud," the brunette complained, wiggling a finger in her ear. "Must you?"
Teal'c experimentally fired his staff weapon, like Jack not aiming at her as such, but more in the general direction. And again the blast fizzled against a wall of energy.,
"We seem to be at an impasse, O'Neill," the big Jaffa commented.
Jack walked forward and used the butt of his gun to prod the air in front of him. Ripples of green light flowed across the room. "Well, damn," he complained. "That's just not fair."
"Neat, isn't it?" the girl said brightly, looking over at them. She pointed at the floor a meter or so from Jack. "That shield generator's not bad but whoever made it didn't quite get it right. I had to modify it a bit to make it work properly."
Everyone looked at the device sitting on the floor, then each other. Sam stared at it before raising incredulous eyes to the girl, who was watching. "You…
modified… it?"
"Yeah. It's a decent design but overcomplicated," the girl replied. "And not properly protected against overload. I fixed that and optimized it a little. Unfortunately I don't have all the right equipment here to do a really neat job but that's life, right? I didn't exactly plan on being here in the first place." She turned back to the laptop and started typing very fast. "I had to improvise a lot, which is always a bit messy, you know?" she continued over her shoulder. "I'm really not happy about the whole thing. And it's embarrassing having to half-ass it like this."
Everyone exchanged glances as she kept typing.
"Stupid teleporters and Tinkers who can't make them right," the girl went on in a lower voice. "They had
one job! How hard was that? And no one thought to add a subspace error detection system. Amateurs, the lot of them."
Her voice trailed off into aggrieved muttering. Daniel leaned closer to Sam who was still staring at the girl and whispered, "She sounds like you."
The blonde twitched then glared at him.
"I do not sound like that."
"Incorrect," Teal'c said.
She transferred her glare to the larger man, who raised an eyebrow, making Daniel snicker quietly.
"Aha!"
The girl jumped up and rushed over to the machine on the floor. "OK, got the subspace vector matrix all done, and the dimensional coordinates should be right too. Let's see..."
"
Who the hell are you?" Jack exploded, slamming his hand on the force-field.
"Oh, sorry, got carried away there," the girl apologized, turning to look at him. "My name is Taylor Hebert. I'm an accidental visitor from another parallel world. I think." She scratched her nose, leaving a small smudge of grease, a thoughtful expression on her face. "It's complicated. Another plane of existence? Something like that. I'm still trying to work out the proper terminology. Anyway, it's a whole teleport accident, wormhole interaction, timing sort of problem." She waved a hand vaguely at the ceiling. "Your wormhole and my teleport got together with a subspace surge and things went sideways. And here I am. Tada!"
Taylor grinned at them for a moment. Jack pinched the bridge of his nose and counted very quietly to ten. "And now I want to go home. I didn't think you'd let me play with your ring thing, so I had to build my own. All I need to do now is get a good clean dimensional punch going and I should be able to connect to the teleporter and get back and then I'll be out of your hair."
She went back to working on the machine, connecting a couple of hand-held devices to it and tapping on them rapidly.
"Sorry about kind of borrowing some of your bits and pieces, by the way, but I needed them," she added, still working. "Your security needs some changes. I've made a list of the openings I found in various places, it's over there on the crate." A hand waved across the room. "And I've documented the shield generator too, there's a schematic and notes on the theory of operation."
She leaned over the machine and adjusted it in a few places, then looked at the device in her hand. "Just about ready to give it a shot, I think," she said, sounding pleased.
Taking a longer cable she ran it between the machine and her laptop, then sat down on the smaller crate. A sound behind Daniel made him look back to see General Hammond come into the room and look around, before fixing his eyes on the girl.
"What's going on?" he asked in a somewhat insistent manner.
"I have no idea," Daniel admitted.
"Colonel?" Hammond turned to Jack who was glaring at the girl. Teal'c was now standing with his staff over his shoulder watching with interest, while Sam seemed almost wordless but was fixated on what was happening. Everyone else was looking entirely puzzled.
"Apparently our visitor there is called Taylor Hebert, she's accidentally here, and she's somehow built something to let her go home out of random parts she found around the base. Which she seems to have just wandered around without anyone seeing her, or any of the security having the slightest effect," Jack growled.
"And she fixed the shield generator," Daniel put in, unable to stop himself.
"Shield generator?" Hammond echoed.
Everyone pointed at the faintly humming device on the floor, including Taylor, who didn't look away from her laptop.
"Apparently that's what the artifact SG-3 recovered is. She said it wasn't properly made. So she improved it."
"It'll turn off once I've gone," Taylor called.
"Oh, good," Jack sighed.
"How did you recharge a ZPM?" Sam shouted.
"A what?" Taylor looked back at them.
"A zero point module! That thing." Sam gesticulated at the ZPM, which was now glowing merrily and obviously fully functional.
The girl peered at it, then shrugged. "It wasn't that hard. A subspace power tap and some superconductive wiring did the job. I had to go slow, it's pretty old and I didn't know if it was still good. Seems fine though." She turned back to the keyboard and started typing again.
Sam's mouth was opening and closing but nothing was coming out. Daniel looked at her with some worry.
"Miss? I'm General George Hammond, commander of this base." Hammond sounded like he was doing his best to keep a grip on his patience.
"Oh, hello, General. Sorry about all the trouble." She smiled at him. "Don't worry, I should be gone soon." Her smile slipped a little. "I'm worried about my dad," she added more quietly.
"Your dad?" Hammond regarded her closely.
"Yeah, our place came under attack and while we were evacuating some idiot hit the emergency teleport," Taylor complained, pausing her typing and turning to him. "No idea who it was. CUI, maybe, or just some crazy Parahuman. Shit happens, you know? But the teleport went wrong and I ended up here instead of where I was supposed to be." She looked around, then back at them. "Right location, wrong world." The girl shrugged tiredly, making Daniel aware that under the deliberately cheerful smile she was exhausted. "And I have to do all the work to get home because the idiotic Tinker who made the teleporter probably couldn't figure out how to do it
right if I gave him instructions in crayon."
She stared at her machine for a moment, then muttered, "He probably drew the schematics in crayon, thinking about it. Tinkers..." Taylor shook her head.
Daniel looked at Sam, who shrugged. Apparently that meant something to the girl but he had no idea what.
"Anyway, I figured out what went wrong and how to fix it, but I had a pretty good idea that this being a military place would cause all sorts of problems if I just walked up to someone and asked to borrow your star gate thingy. So I sort of… went around the problem." She smiled again. "I'm good at that."
Returning to the laptop she began working again. "And I've missed my movie with Amy, and dad will be worried, and Brendan will be going crazy, and the entire government will be at Defcon One… Fucking Tinkers..." She kept muttering in a nearly inaudible voice as she typed.
Hammond motioned for SG-1 to come closer. When they were standing near him, he said very quietly, "Ideas?"
"She's able to recharge a
ZPM, General," Sam replied equally quietly, still sounding incredulous. "No one can do that. We can't, even the Asgard can't as far as I know. And she identified and
fixed one of the most powerful force-field generators I've ever seen. Apparently with spare parts she found in Lab 9. I'm not sure she's actually human. I think she might be an Ancient or something of that nature."
"Is that possible?" the general inquired. He looked at Daniel, then Jack, and finally Teal'c.
"Maybe," Daniel said after thinking it over. "But something doesn't quite fit with that idea." He looked over at Taylor who was still typing, apparently writing a novel at about two hundred words per minute. "She's awfully young for a start."
"She might be a million years old and only
look like a teenager," Jack pointed out.
"I'm sixteen," Taylor called without looking up. "And I can still hear you fine."
"Oh, great," Jack muttered with a scowl.
The girl laughed a little but kept working.
"What are we going to do about this?" Hammond asked once he'd led them further away, out into the corridor where they could still see the girl but hopefully were out of earshot.
"I'm not sure we can do anything but watch," Daniel remarked. "That force-field seems pretty much impenetrable, so how would we even get to her? And if she really is here by accident and is just trying to go home,
should we try to stop her? She hasn't really damaged anything per se, she's just sort of… borrowed… a few things. And from what she said she's even left notes on what she did for us."
As the general opened his mouth to say something, Taylor shouted, "Yes!"
They all went back to see what was going on this time.
"Got it! Compiled with no errors, and that should make this all work. Final check..."
The girl dashed over to the machine she'd built and crouched next to it, carefully going over the whole thing with the assurance of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Apparently satisfied she stood up and went back to the computer. "This might be a bit loud," she told them. Then she typed a command and hit the last key before putting her fingers in her ears.
A moment later the ZPM glowed more brightly, then the machine it was plugged into came to life. Coils around the periphery of the central torus began glowing quite brightly in a pleasant lavender shade as a throbbing hum built out of nowhere, rising to a level that made the entire room vibrate. Daniel put his hands over his ears, followed by everyone else doing the same. After a few seconds of the sound getting louder and deeper while giving the impression of a vast amount of power winding up, there was a nearly subsonic
whoomph sound like the footfall of something incomprehensibly vast taking a step. The torus flashed brilliantly then settled down to a steady and familiar glow as a rippling blue energy field filled the center of it.
"She made a star gate," Sam said in a dead voice.
"Kind of," Taylor replied, looking supremely satisfied as she took her fingers out of her ears. "It's a tweaked version and not as flexible, but it's a lot more efficient." Turning to her laptop she tapped the mouse pad a couple of times and studied the graphs on the screen. "Perfect interdimensional punchthrough. Brilliant. And all I should have to do is adjust it like this..." A few seconds of work made the energy field change in an indescribable manner. She squinted at it, then nodded. "Great. Let's see..."
Picking up one of the smaller devices next to her elbow she tapped it a couple of times then put it to her ear. Her expression was tense as everyone watched, wondering what would happen next.
Suddenly she smiled widely. "Dad! You're OK?"
The expression of relief that went across her face was so profound Daniel could almost feel it.
"Oh, thank everything holy," she breathed. "And Angus? Brendan? Everyone at Gravtec?"
"Fantastic. Yeah, I'm fine. It was that stupid emergency teleport. Got mixed up with someone else's wormhole generator and some sort of power surge and I ended up in an HVAC duct in another world. Yeah. I know. But what can you do? Oh, trust me, I'm going to have words with him. Yep. You hold him down, I write '
test it properly' on his forehead with a soldering iron?"
Daniel winced. She sounded serious.
"Oh, fine, I won't maim the idiot. I'll leave that to Brendan. I'll just scare him a bit. Well, a lot. Yeah, Amy can help. And Vicky." She chuckled as they all exchanged looks. "OK. I've got a few things to clean up here then I'll call back and we can try again. Yeah, the hardware will work for a couple of hours before it burns out." She looked at the machine. "Yeah. Sure. I've already apologized. They're looking confused, but… I know. All right. Tell everyone I'm fine and I'll be back soon. OK. I'll do that. Maybe ten minutes or so? Yes. Bye for now."
She pulled the apparent phone from her ear and tapped it, then looked at the thing for several seconds, a smile on her face. Eventually she looked up at her audience.
"Dad says I should apologize again for causing you guys trouble. I really am sorry, honest." She stood as she spoke and began packing up her equipment, putting it into a backpack she retrieved from the floor next to the crate she'd been sitting on. "I ate some of your rations over there, and used some of the bottled water. I hope that's not going to cause a problem." The girl kept packing away odds and ends, the laptop being the last thing she put into the pack. The machine kept running even when it was disconnected.
"I'll leave you this charging unit, you might find it useful, and my notes on how to use it are here." She held up a notebook, then put it on the crate. "I also documented some of the other devices I used too. It's in the book as well. Sorry about the wormhole generator, it'll shut down when I leave and wipe all the programming. I can't really give you the coordinates to home, aside from anything else Brendan would get annoyed. Security, you know? And trust me, you wouldn't really want some of our brand of crazy. It makes those Goa'uld of yours look simple. Good luck with them, by the way."
She kept moving around during her monologue, tidying up all her working area and neatly sorting out tools and equipment, some of it going into her pockets and the rest being left on the large crate. "Oh, yeah, sorry, I kind of hacked into your mission reports. Some of them were pretty funny. You guys should write fiction, it would be hilarious."
Taylor grinned at them, but she looked tired and ready to fall over.
"Right, I think that's it. Nice to have met you all, in a sense. Good luck with your five year mission or whatever it is." Walking over to the other side of the force-field she looked at each of them in turn, stopping on Hammond. "I really am sorry about causing you any trouble, General," she said quietly. "But I couldn't take the risk of getting stuck here. I've got too much work to do at home and people need me."
The general met her eyes for several seconds, then nodded slowly. "Good luck, Miss Hebert."
"Thank you." She knelt next to the shield generator and fiddled with the device for a moment, then stood again. "It'll shut off a few minutes after I leave," she explained, before moving to the middle of the room. Pulling a necklace with some sort of technological pendant on it out of her pocket she put it over her neck, then shrugged the backpack on.
The girl took out her phone and tapped it again. Putting it to her ear, after a couple of seconds she smiled. "Yep. All done."
Listening for a moment, Taylor nodded. "Everything's set." She looked at them and waved, before smirking a little "One to beam up."
There was a flash of light and she vanished.
Seconds later the machine made a rumbling sound and the wormhole interface flickered out, followed by a sizzling noise and a small cloud of smoke rising into the air. Sam made a sound of distress as she watched.
The ZPM's glow dimmed down to a much lower level as the machine died.
They waited, and about five minutes later the force-field rippled with green light then blinked off with an audible ping. The low background hum the generator had produced stopped.
Waving his hand cautiously in front of himself, Jack took a step, then another. "Yeah, it's gone," he said.
"I still have no real idea what the hell just happened," Daniel commented wryly.
"Join the club," Jack muttered as he walked over to the crate and looked at the stuff lying on top of it. Sam went over to the now-defunct machine and gazed sadly at it, before joining him and picking up the notebook Taylor had left them. She started flipping through it, stopping dead three pages in and staring.
"Oh my god," she breathed.
"Useful information?" Daniel asked as he walked over.
She raised wide eyes to him, nodding wordlessly, before sitting down on the same crate Taylor had used and carefully turning pages with a look of stunned amazement on her face. Daniel and Jack exchanged glances, then left her to it.
As they left the room to write what was going to be one
hell of a report, they passed General Hammond who was looking at the wormhole generator with a face betraying his feelings. He sighed a little, then turned and followed them.
Shortly Sam was the only one in the room, still reading the notebook with enormous interest.
