Are You Ready? Chapter XXV

[Don Sample]

Note: Some dialog in this chapter is taken from the <i>Stargate SG-1</i>
episode "Moebius".

Previous parts of this story can be found at
http://buffybodycount.ca/Fics/AreYouReady/index.html


Cassie enjoyed her Christmas vacation in Colorado. She enjoyed seeing
her friends from school who hadn't left town or who had come home
themselves for the holidays. She pretended to be completely innocent
when Daniel started translating the book that she'd gotten a copy of
from the Council library -- written in Egyptian hieroglyphics -- when he
discovered was really ancient Egyptian erotic poetry. She did tell him
that it had been Dawn that recommended it to her. She did tell General
Jack that she'd gotten Jack's advice for what to get him for Christmas.
The funniest thing about it was that when she'd emailed General Jack a
month ago for advice on what to get Jack, he'd said exactly the same
thing. As always the trickiest present had been the one for Sam. She had
finally settled on a first edition copy of <i>Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance.</i>

Once the Christmas vacation was done, she had to take a commercial
flight back to England, but she did manage to upgrade to business class,
since she hadn't had to spend any money on her flight back to the
States. It still wasn't as nice as her Air Force flight home had been.

She brought back presents for Jack -- who had spent Christmas with Dawn
at Giles' place in Westbury -- from most of the members of SG-1. The
only one who hadn't given her something to take to him was General Jack.
He said that he was sending Jack his present through Air Force channels,
since it was something that Cassie wouldn't be able to carry on a
commercial flight. That got Cassie really curious about what it could
be. She made Jack promise to call her when it was delivered, so she
could be there when he opened whatever it was.


Jack took delivery of a heavy package from an Air Force courier a couple
of days later. He called Cassie and Dawn so that they could join him and
Andrew in their set before he opened it. Inside the plain brown
cardboard box was something heavy, wrapped in brightly coloured
<i>Simpsons</i> Christmas wrapping paper; and a card in an envelope. The
card had a picture of Homer in a Santa suit, and the message written
inside just said that Jack should be able to figure out the combination.

Jack ripped the paper away from his present, and found it was covering a
metal box, about one foot on a side, and six inches deep, with a
combination lock on it.

He tried out various combinations that he figured Jack might have picked
for him, ranging from his old military service number from the days
before the Air Force had switched over to using social security numbers,
to the PIN for Jack's ATM card. He hit on the right one when he tried
the combination from his old SGC locker.

He opened the lid of the box, and was shocked by what was packed,
tightly nestled in dense foam, inside it.

"Is that--?" asked Cassie.

"Yes it is," said Jack.

"What is it?" asked Dawn.

"It's a zat," said Jack.

"What's a zat?" asked Andrew.

Jack pulled the goa'uld weapon from the box, and pressed the stud to
activate it. It sprang open in his hand. "It's short for 'zat'nik'tel'."

"And that is helpful in a way that's not," said Dawn.

"It's an alien weapon, kinda like a phaser," said Cassie.

"For real?" asked Andrew. "That is so cool!"

"Getting shot once with one is kinda like being hit by a taser," said
Jack. "Getting shot a second time, right after that, will kill most
people."

"I wonder what it will do to a vamp, or some other demon," said Dawn.

"I've been wondering that, ever since I found out that such things
existed," said Jack. "Maybe now, I'll get a chance to find out."

"Don't forget to take a stake along too, just in case it doesn't work."


Classes for the Lent Term at Cambridge got underway the next week.
Cassie wondered a bit about the strange English term names. Why couldn't
they just call it the Winter Term?

While classes went along pretty much as expected, there was a bit of an
annoying change in her living arrangements. Jack was spending a lot of
nights in Dawn's room ... and she was spending a lot of nights in his.
Cassie much preferred the nights that Dawn spent with Jack, since she
didn't have to overhear what they were doing together on those nights.
Enhanced hearing could be a bitch sometimes, and there was only so much
that her environmental recordings could cover up. She was just about
ready to give up, and suggest that she and Jack should just switch
rooms, so she could share a set with Andrew, and Jack could move in with
Dawn.

---

Dawn rolled over in her bed as she awoke, reaching for Jack. Her arm
only met with empty space. She lay in her bed for a moment, wondering
where he had gotten to. He hadn't mentioned anything last night about
having to get up early this morning. She opened her eyes.

Dawn blinked. This wasn't her room ... but it was. It was like waking
from one of those really realistic dreams, where it took you a little
while to figure out what was real, and what was the dream. She heard
pounding on her door, and realized that it was what had waked her.

"Dawn! Get up! You're going to be late for class!"

Dawn knew that voice. It was a voice she hadn't heard for years. It was
a voice that <em>couldn't</em> be real, but one that she also remembered
belonged to her roommate. She sat up in her bed. "I'm awake!" she said.

The door of her room opened, and Amanda looked in at her. "You better
get moving," she said. "You've got class in twenty minutes."

Dawn blinked. Amanda was her roommate here at Oxford. They had been
friends since before the destruction of Sunnydale. She remembered Amanda
on the bus out of Sunnydale, and she remembered her grief from hearing
what had happened to her friend ... She remembered Amanda living ... and
she remembered Amanda dying. She remembered being a student at Cambridge
University with her roommate Cassie, and her new boyfriend Jack ... and
she remembered attending Oxford with her friend Amanda, and currently
not having a boyfriend.

"I'm not going to class today," she said.

Dawn got out of bed, and went to the laptop computer on her desk. She
logged into the Council's web site. It took a couple of attempts to
remember the right password. The first one she tried was the one that
worked when she was in Cambridge. She went to the database of Slayers
and typed "Cassandra Fraiser" into the search form, and clicked on the
"Search" button. She got zero hits. She tried both "Fraiser" and
"Cassandra" with the same result. She tried searching for Slayers from
Colorado, and got one she recognized from Denver, but she wasn't Cassie.
She tried a few other names that she remembered, and got the expected
results for nearly all of them. She was saddened to learn that some of
the Slayers that she remembered from the world with Cassie and Jack had
been killed by the Bringers, while they were still Potentials. Finding
living Slayers in this world who had died as Potentials in the other
world didn't really balance the scales in her mind. Sometimes two
negatives didn't make a positive. Sometimes they made things even more
negative.

---

Dawn looked around at the faces on the screens in the conference room of
the Oxford chapter of the Anacreontic Society. Xander and Anya were
sitting together on one of the screens, and she felt a tightness in her
chest. She could remember Anya's death ... she could remember Xander's
grief. This was going to be harder than she thought. She also couldn't
help noticing that Faith was missing.

"You called this meeting, Dawn" said Giles, "What's going on?"

"I wish I knew," said Dawn. "I just know it's something weird. I've
suddenly got two sets of memories for the last couple of years."

"What do you mean?" asked Buffy.

"I mean that I have two different sets of memories for how the last
couple of years have gone," said Dawn. "Ever since the destruction of
Sunnydale ... I remember things going differently."

"How differently?" asked Anya.

Dawn closed her eyes. She <em>really</em> didn't want to go into that
right now ... especially with Anya. "Let's just say that the Slayer
Memorial monument has got some different names on it ... there's the
same number of names, they're just different."

"What different names?" asked Anya.

"I'd really rather not say," said Dawn, "but in my other memories,
Amanda isn't my roommate. Giles, did you get anywhere tracking down
those names I gave you?"

"I have found no record of anyone named 'Cassandra Fraiser,' or a
'Jonathan O'Neill' under twenty years old. There is a retired Air Force
Colonel with that name, but he is over fifty."

Dawn nodded. "That makes sense. What about the other names I gave you?"

"Doctor Janet Fraiser is the chief of Emergency Medicine at Johns
Hopkins University Hospital, in Baltimore," said Giles. "She has never
been in the Air Force. Neither has Samantha Carter; she's working with
NASA's Department of Aerospace Research. Daniel Jackson is teaching
English as a Second Language classes in Chicago. He'd had a promising
career as a researcher in archaeology -- we even considered trying to
recruit him -- but some of his theories were too outlandish."

"Theories about aliens visiting Earth in the past?" asked Dawn.

"Yes," said Giles. "How did you know?"

"In my other set of memories, I've met an alien," said Dawn. "And Daniel
Jackson, and those other people were instrumental in our making first
contact with them."


Vi sat on a boat in the slip next to the one belonging to a retired Air
Force colonel, pretending to be doing nothing but sun-bathing. Jack
O'Neill had been the only one of the three names that Dawn had
identified as being from some sort of elite alien fighting team in some
other reality that they had been able to locate. Dr. Daniel Jackson had
left his small apartment in Chicago the day before the Council team had
turned up to look for him there, and Dr. Samantha Carter wasn't home
either.

At first it had seemed that O'Neill had vanished too, but it had turned
out that he'd just been out on his boat. Vi didn't really know what to
make of this situation. Dawn suddenly claiming to have two sets of
memories of the last few years wasn't the weirdest thing that had ever
happened to many of them. Her knowledge of Drs. Jackson and Carter, even
if it didn't match these people exactly, was close enough to warrant
further investigation. Them both vanishing from their known day jobs at
the same time made it even more likely that something was going on, so
they had inserted a Slayer team into the marina where O'Neill kept his
boat, to keep an eye on him.

They had done so by the simple expedient of borrowing the boat that
Kennedy's family kept in Fort Lauderdale, and parking it next to
O'Neill's boat with Vi and a couple of other Slayers aboard pretending
to be a bunch of college students taking a bit of a vacation. The fact
that they all <em>were</em> college students, and were just as likely to
be seen reading textbooks as the current best-seller while sunning on
the boat's deck didn't hurt in establishing their covers. Another boat,
this one rented from a local charter agency, with their Watcher and
Witch support aboard, was parked a couple of docks over. With the two
element team they didn't have to be completely obvious that they were
watching O'Neill's boat. The Slayers could sail out of the marina on
days when O'Neill was staying at the dock, or they could stay at the
dock on the days when O'Neill had a charter, while the other boat took
up the following duties. It would take a particularly paranoid person to
pick up that wherever he went, there was always at least one of a pair
of boats that had him in sight. (Though Dawn had warned them that the
other Jack O'Neill, from her other set of memories, was the sort of man
who would pick up on that sort of thing.)

Jack (as he'd told them to call him) was a pleasant enough guy, though
he seemed to be a bit bitter. The Council's research into his background
had shown that he'd gotten divorced and left the Air Force shortly after
the death of his son, and it seemed that he had never really recovered
from it.

So far this assignment had been pretty boring, with the biggest
development being in Vi's tan. She spent a lot of time sitting out on
the front deck of their boat, reading books, or pretending to nap in the
sun, with her eyes covered by a big set of sunglasses that let her keep
them open, and watching. Jack kept to himself most of the time when he
didn't have a charter. At the moment he was doing some work on his
engine, which seemed to involve a lot of swearing. Vi was considering
ending her pretend nap, and offering to help. She didn't know anything
about boat motors, but she could pass him tools, and provide an extra
pair of hands to hold things steady.

That plan was nixed when she spotted Drs. Jackson and Carter making
their way down the dock, looking at slip-numbers. They went past her,
and stopped at O'Neill's boat, just in time for him to bark his knuckles
when his wrench slipped.

"Ow! Damn!" he swore, and shook his hand. He looked up and noticed his
visitors. "You folks lookin' for a little tour?" he asked.

"Jack O'Neill?" asked Dr. Jackson.

Jack eyed them suspiciously. "Yeah."

"Uh, I'm Daniel Jackson; this is Samantha Carter."

"You two a couple?" asked Jack.

"No, no, no, we just, we just met," said Jackson.

"What do you want?" asked Jack.

"Well uh, we were recently approached by the military about a matter of,
um, national security," said Dr. Carter.

Jack went back to work on his engine. "Don't care."

"This is really important," said Dr. Jackson. "All we're asking is a
little bit of your time."

"A hundred and fifty bucks an hour to rent the boat," said Jack.

"We don't wanna go anywhere," said Dr. Jackson.

"It's your money," said Jack.

Carter and Jackson exchanged a look, and he reached for his back pocket.
"I think I've got fifty bucks."

"Me too," said Dr. Carter. "So, can we have forty minutes of your time?"
She looked around, and saw Vi, but she was far enough away that she
wouldn't expect that Vi would be able to overhear their conversation,
and she was doing a very good impression of a sleeping girl, anyway. She
treated it as a meditation exercise.

Vi had a hard time keeping up that impression as she listened in on
Jackson and Carter's rather one sided conversation, starting right from
the beginning, when she kept her face completely blank when O'Neill told
them that they had to put on life jackets ... even though the boat
wasn't leaving the dock, and he wasn't wearing one himself. Vi knew that
he did it just to annoy them, and maybe make them go away.

She listened as Drs. Jackson and Carter told O'Neill about the discovery
of a five thousand year old video camera in a tomb in Egypt, and
described what was recorded on the tape it contained. Their story
confirmed some of the details of what Dawn had told them about the other
timeline, but she had a hard time imagining that this pair of dorky
scientists could be part of some elite military team.

Jack didn't really say much, just giving occasional grunts, or making
some sarcastic comments to show that he wasn't completely ignoring them
while he puttered about on his boat.

Jackson finished describing what was on the tape. "So ultimately what we
have to do is this: we have to find the Stargate and then get hold of
this time travel device."

"Locate this alien named Teal'c," added Carter. Vi remembered that Dawn
had mentioned him, as one of the Colorado Springs Slayer's friends.

"Right," said Jackson. "Get Teal'c first, then go back in time to change
the past, fix the future."

Jack didn't seem to be paying any attention to him, choosing to work on
one of his fishing poles, instead. "Are you listening?" asked Jackson.

"I was trying not to," said Jack.

"Yeah, I suppose it does sound a little crazy," said Jackson.

"Really? Which part?" asked Jack. "I'd have to say: the moment I let you
on board."

Vi hoped that no one noticed her lips twitch.

"You don't have to believe us," said Carter. "All we ask is that you
watch the tape and decide for yourself."

"You know, I have decided." Jack looked at his watch. "And hey look,
your time's up!"

"Aren't you in the least bit intrigued that there might be something
else out there, somewhere?" asked Jackson. "Something more than this!"

Jack stared at them for a few seconds. "No."

"We're supposed to be a team," said Jackson. "We saved the world."

"Several times," said Carter.

Jack put on an accent that sounded like it came straight out of
<i>Fargo.</i> "Yeah. Okay. Sure. I'll buy that. Uh huh. The three of us.
The world, we save it, right? Okay."

"I can't believe I wasted my frequent flyer miles on this," Carter told
Jackson.

"Sorry to bother you," said Jackson to Jack.

"Not a problem," said Jack.

Carter and Jackson stood up, and started to remove their life jackets,
but Jack wouldn't let them take them off until they were back on the
dock. They threw the jackets back down into Jack's boat, and stalked
angrily away.

"No worries, eh?" Jack called after them, but his face went thoughtful
as soon as they were out of sight. He also gave Vi a good look, as if he
suspected that she wasn't really sleeping, but she stayed lying still in
the sun, breathing evenly, and not seeming to take any notice of
anything going on around her, even after he went below deck on his boat.
She waited nearly half a hour, thinking over everything she had learned
before she pretended to wake up, stretched, and went back into the cabin
of their boat to call Dawn.

---

"According to Carter and Jackson, a video tape from the lot of them was
found in that tomb that was just unearthed in Egypt," said Vi. "The
other thems went back in time, and their interference made this new
world. Our Jackson and Carter were trying to enlist O'Neill's help to
try to restore the original time line."

"But what's to say which time line is the 'right' one?" asked Giles.
"Dawn, you have memories of both."

"Yeah," said Dawn. "And for Carter, Jackson, and O'Neill, I can see the
attraction of the other timeline. In it, they are all highly respected
in their fields. From the hints I've heard, the other Samantha Carter is
in the running for at least three Nobel Prizes, once her work is
declassified. If she wants to talk with him, Stephen Hawking clears time
in his schedule to make room for her. Rumour has it that General
O'Neill's name is the only one on the short list to take over the
department that deals with aliens, and also with our kind of weirdness."

"Not sure how I feel about that," said Buffy. "Ever since Kinsey got
elected President--"

"Best thing about the other universe," said Dawn. "No President Kinsey!
First time I met Jack and Cassie, they were laughing about how
<em>Vice</em> President Kinsey had gotten his comeuppance, and been
forced to resign. In the other universe we have a much better
relationship with the American government. President Hayes isn't the
sort of fellow who would want to burn Willow at the stake."

"President Hayes?" asked Giles.

"Yeah, he's the Interior Secretary now, but in my other memories, he's
President, and seems to be a decent guy."

"Still, if we, or the Air Force, <em>do</em> manage to 'fix' whatever
they think went wrong, what happens to us?" asked Willow. "Even if there
are versions of us in the other world, they <em>aren't</em> us. Should
we be doing anything to help them, or stop them, or what?"

"I don't know," said Dawn. "I don't even have any ideas about what we
<em>can</em> do."

--
Quando omni flunkus moritati
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