FIC: Beginnings (SG-1, Sam/Janet, PG, 12100 words) [2/2]

[cdybedahl]

Beginnings, part 2

Written by Calle Dybedahl

Living

Samantha raised her rifle, stuck it slowly over the snow-covered log she was hiding behind and aimed at the animal that had just walked out from behind a large rock. From the look of it, it filled the same ecological niche that boars held on Earth. It had a heavy, low-set body on short legs and a head that hung low over the ground. Large brown tusks protruded from its mouth, making a strong contrast to its thick white fur. All in all, the thing probably weighed more than Samantha and Louisa did together.

"Do we know where its heart is?" Samantha whispered.

"Aim for the head," Louisa said. She was lying next to Samantha behind the log, her own rifle still slung on her back.

The thing started to dig into the frozen earth at the foot of a tree. It broke the surface using its tusks, then scratched the loose fragments away with its feet.

Samantha breathed out, put the crosshairs of her scope in the middle of its head, relaxed and squeezed the trigger. The familiar recoil kick threw her aim off, but by then the bullet was well out of the barrel. After the split second it took her vision to readjust to non-magnified reality, the animal was lying on its side twitching.

"Nice shot," Louisa said. "You've got a talent for this."

They stood up.

"Better wait until it stops moving," Louisa said. "We're not in a hurry, might as well be careful."

"Do you think Kathy will be able to make it taste good this time?" Samantha said.

"I doubt it," Louisa said. "But it's nourishing, and we need the skin. Also, I'm told that some of these things have been bothering the sheep."

The forest was still and silent, any sound efficiently absorbed by the foot-deep snow. The trees hung heavy with white, and thin and chilly sunlight filtered down through their branches.

"What's this thing's name, anyway?" Samantha asked as they were cleaning it out for transport.

"I heard someone call it an ice boar," Louisa said. "Which is a pretty good name, I think."

"It seems apt."

They worked on in silence, cutting off the parts of the animal they didn't want for food, materials or research and put the rest on a small sled. It was heavy and dirty work, and the intense cold didn't make it any easier.

"Did they have to put the site on a planet with winters from Hell?" Samantha muttered, more or less to herself.

"Apparently they thought it'd be nice to have the base in a place that can actually support it," Louisa said. "And this isn't winter from Hell. Gamma Site is on a planet so cold that some of the snow is carbon dioxide rather than water. That's winter from Hell."

They strapped the sled to themselves, put on their skis and set off for home. It wasn't easy skiing through the forest pulling a sled, but it still beat walking for several miles through snow that in many places reached waist deep.

The two of them had become close friends, in spite of their very different personalities. As long as they'd been forced to live within easy earshot of each other they'd both made an effort to stay on good terms, and when the time came to start building a permanent home they'd realized that without the other they'd both be pretty much alone. So they built a house together. One bedroom each, a large common kitchen and once the ground thawed they'd lay the pipes and build a proper bathroom. Until then, they had an outhouse and the common shower hall a minute's walk away.

"I think we should hurry," Louisa suddenly said.

Samantha turned to look at her, and then followed her gaze upwards. While they'd been traveling, the sky had turned from clear blue to a leaden grey.

"Snow?" Samantha asked.

"Almost certainly."

They increased their pace, moving forward in silence and with grim determination.

The truth was that they didn't really know how bad winter on Promise would be, since the first Earth visit to the planet had been less than one local year ago. The official version was that it wouldn't be any worse than the middle of Canada, but Janet had told Samantha that that was really just a guess. They'd had a couple of satellites up taking pictures of cloud movements, and they'd jacked those into climate modeling programs and ran simulations. So if Promise was sufficiently like Earth, they'd be fine.

"And if it's not?" Samantha had asked. They'd been having dinner in Janet's cabin, as they usually did a couple of times a week.

"Then we're either unlucky, it gets much worse and we die," Janet said. "Or we're lucky, it gets less bad and we stay alive."

"Or we could go back to Earth," Samantha said.

Janet shook her head.

"No," she said. "We can't. Or, I guess, we could, but it wouldn't do us any good. We're not telling the people here, but Earth is really messed up. The Goa'uld's orbital bombardment threw enough dust into the atmosphere that the global average temperature has dropped almost five degrees already. It's July back home, and there's still snow falling as far south as Houston. There won't be any harvests from the grain belt this year, and international shipping has stopped. Food is already getting scarce, and the Pentagon's estimate is that around 90% of the US population will die from starvation, exposure and disease over the next twelve months. For the rest of the world, nobody really knows, but there's been seismographic signs of nuclear groundbursts in the general area of the Russian-Chinese border."

Samantha stared at her, shocked.

"But we're still getting shipments," she said. "We're getting food and machines and medical supplies and all sorts of stuff from Earth."

Janet got up from her chair and moved over to the window looking out over the snow-covered village.

"So are the other two offworld sites," she said. "Because at the moment it looks like we're the best chance our culture has of surviving."

Samantha tried to absorb that. It wasn't easy.

"So why aren't there any more people coming through?" she said.

"No more are being let through. We already have what's supposed to be enough for a viable colony," Janet said. "And, in case you hadn't noticed, a ten-to-one ratio of women to men. Plus, and this is another thing that I'm not really talking about publically, several pallets of cryogenically frozen sperm and insemination equipment. We'll start encouraging people to use those as soon as we know the colony is stable."

Samantha laughed, a short and joyless laugh.

"We shouldn't have called this place Promise," she said. "We should've called it Ark."

She rose and went to look out the window, carefully placing herself just as close to Janet as she dared. As the other-universe counterparts of herself and Janet had predicted, she'd fallen head over heels in love with this Janet. Unfortunately, it didn't seem like it had worked the other way around. Sure, they were pretty close friends and they spent quite a bit of time together, but every time Samantha tried to go even a little bit further she was ever-so-gently rebuffed.

"I think that's what Gamma are calling themselves," Janet said. "But then, they're mostly living in caves, so maybe they feel it more strongly. And they still haven't found a viable long-term food source."

"What about Alpha?"

Janet sighed.

"Their climate has turned out all right," she said. "The year is much shorter there, so they've already been through two cycles. They're no worse off than us when it comes to food."

"But?"

"But it turns out that Earth metabolisms are like candy to the local microbiology. They're having really bad problems with diseases. They think they'll pull through, but at the moment it's not a fun place to be."

Samantha clasped her hands behind her back.

"So we're the last, best hope?" she said.

Janet gave her a surprised look, then laughed.

"Yeah," she said. "Maybe we should have called the place Babylon 6."

Samantha looked uncomprehendingly at her.

"Oh come on," Janet said. "Surely you must have watched Babylon 5?"

Samantha shook her head. "Was it good?" she said.

"It was excellent," Janet said. "Pity it never got finished."

"I wish I'd seen it," Samantha said.

"Not that it'll at all be the same," Janet said, "but if you wish I could retell at least large parts of it."

Samantha looked down at Janet with a peculiar expression on her face.

"You know it by heart?" she said.

Janet looked back up at her, defiant.

"I've got a good memory, and I liked it enough to watch the episodes over and over again."

"That is so geeky!" Samantha said.

"Well, we can't all be tall blonde Miss Perfects!"

"Oh no!" Samantha said, waving her hands in denial. "I didn't mean it like that! I'm impressed, nothing else!"

Janet glared at her for a few heartbeats.

"So do you want to hear about it or not?" she said.

"I'm all ears."

Janet left the window, sat down and poured herself some cooling coffee.

"Ok," she said. "First you need to know the people."

Samantha sat down as well, in her chair across the table.

"Are they hot?" she asked.

Janet smiled. "Let me tell you about Ivanova..."

From then on, the retelling of Babylon 5 episodes became part of their regular dinners. Samantha suspected that Janet changed and made up quite a bit of it, but she certainly didn't mind. She liked hearing about how Susan Ivanova's and Talia Winters' love grew as they battled the Shadows, no matter how much like wish-fulfillment the stories seemed or how they contradicted each other. And, of course, it was yet another reason to spend time with Janet. Which was both a blessing and a curse. Samantha had hoped that her infatuation with the petite commander would fade over time, as she got to know the real person better. And in a way it did, but only to be replaced with full-blown love. She tried telling herself that it could never be, that Janet wasn't interested, that she couldn't have that kind of relationship with someone under her command. Those thoughts helped, in a way. As the months passed and the winter grew fiercer, Samantha resigned herself to living with an empty heart. She dedicated herself to helping Janet as much as possible, and took the gratitude she got as her reason to wake up in the morning.

And then, one day when she came over to Janet's house for dinner and B5, she found the commander sitting in the darkness staring out through the window.

"Janet?" she said while she shook snow from her parka and hung it up to dry. "What's wrong?"

"It's gone," Janet said. Her voice sounded hollow. The smell of the biochemistry group's moonshine was in the air.

Samantha remained standing by the door, ice melting in her hair and dripping on her thick sweater.

"What is gone?" she said.

"Earth," Janet said.

"What? How can Earth be gone?"

Janet took a swig from a bottle Samantha hadn't seen her holding in the dark.

"No clue," she said. "But neither we nor Ark or Pestilence have got any call-ins from SGC for more than 72 hours now."

"Did you try calling back?"

Janet's nod silhouetted against the slight less dark square of the window.

"It connects just fine. But we can't get any radio contact, and when we shoved a camera through, it showed us a large cave covered in ice. With no DHD, so I'm not sending anybody through to check it out."

Samantha frowned. "That's not even possible. A gate address can't just suddenly start going somewhere else."

Janet shrugged. "As I said, there's no DHD and I'm not going to risk anybody. Things were pretty dire at the other end anyway. There was apparently a fair bit of resentment at food and resources being sent offplanet when tens of millions were starving at home. No, I'm sure the SGC is gone. We're on our own."

On an impulse, Samantha knelt next to Janet's chair and gently put arms around the smaller woman.

"Hey," she said. "It'll be all right. We're pretty well prepared. We're going to make it."

Janet turned to look Samantha in the eyes.

"Ark are starving," she said. "I offered to send what little food we can spare, but that wouldn't be enough to make a difference so we decided that it'd just weaken us for no reason. Unless a miracle happens in the next week, they're going to start shipping their hardware over to us. No use for that when they're all dead."

Samantha stayed where she was, trying to put strength into Janet by sheer force of will. Hopefully, at least contact and body heat helped somewhat.

"Pestilence now," Janet went on, "they're kind of all right. They've got enough food, and those of them who still live seem to be immune to the diseases. Problem is, we still have no understanding of the diseases and they kill nine out of ten people who go there. So even if everybody here went to them, the survivors after the sicknesses took theirs would still be below the viability threshold. And we don't dare let anything from there come here, for fear of contagion. They won't give up, of course, but even if they manage not to die out there's no way they'll retain a technological civilization."

Tears ran down Janet's face.

"We're it, Samantha," she said. "We're the only chance our culture has of survival. And it's all my responsibility. I'm not sure if I can do this."

Samantha felt as if the howling winter outside had blown into her and frozen her insides.

"Hush," she said. "Of course you can do it. You've done it until now, haven't you? Everybody here trusts you."

That wasn't what she really wanted to say. She wanted to tell Janet that she didn't have to be alone, that she only had to whisper a yes and Samantha would be at her side to support and help her every second of every hour of every day. But she didn't. If Janet had wanted that, she'd have said something long ago, so saying it now would only add to her burdens.

Janet let her head drop forward and rested her forehead against Samantha's.

"What if I get it wrong?" she said in a low and scared voice. "What if we all die?"

"Then nobody will ever know," Samantha said in an equally low voice. "If you do it, which I'm sure you will, we'll all think you're a hero. And if you fail, there'll be nobody to criticize you."

Janet laughed a little.

"Cold comfort," she said.

"Better than none," Samantha said.

Janet moved her head away far enough that she could see Samantha clearly.

"Samantha?" she said.

"Yes?"

"Promise you won't leave me?"

Samantha's mouth went dry. Her hands went sweaty and the room swam around her.

"I won't," she somehow managed to get out. "As long as you want me here, I'll never leave. I promise."

"She shouldn't be called Colonel any more," Louisa said a few days later.

They were out hunting again. Kathy and her chef team had finally figured out a way to make ice boar taste good, which combined with its habit of bothering livestock had made it their primary prey.

"Why not?" Samantha said.

"Well, she rules the entire planet, doesn't she?" Louisa said. "Someone who does that should have a cooler title than colonel."

It had been a good hunting day. They shot two already, and marked them for pickup by snowmobile. They'd found spoor of a third, and was closing in on it. On Earth, they would've been dead silent, but for some reason many animals on Promise had very poor hearing. Including the ice boars.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Dictator? Supreme Ruler? Empress?"

"Nah," Samantha said. "Too showy. If anything, I think it should be something simple. Like 'Boss'."

Louisa climbed over a fallen tree.

"Boss," she said. "Boss Fraiser. Yeah, that kind of works."

She stepped off the tree and immediately sank down to her armpits in loose snow.

"Fuck!" she said. "I hate this damn snow! How long is it going to last anyway?"

Samantha climbed up onto the tree, and with joined efforts they got Louisa up from the snow and onto the trunk.

"Month before last," Samantha panted. "According to our projections."

Louisa glared at her.

"Your projections are crap," she said.

"Yeah," Samantha said. "We kind of figured."

"So are we going to die?"

Samantha shook her head. "The weather hasn't got much worse in the last few months," she said. "Hunting is good enough that we won't starve, even if it'll be a bit of an involuntary Atkins diet. We'll be all right. People live in worse places on Earth."

Louisa looked up to where the wind tore the tops of the trees. It was almost still down by the ground, but up there it looked quite uncomfortable.

"Are there places like this on Earth?" she said.

"Well, there are places with the snow and the cold. Maybe not any with this kind of wind."

They both looked up again. For a few moments, all that could be heard was the wind's steady howl.

"How bad is the wind?" Louisa asked.

"I think we should have another look at that," Samantha said.

The government of Promise met in the dining hall. There had been talk about building a dedicated administrative building, but Janet didn't like it. She preferred to hold meetings where people could see. It built trust, she said. Let the citizens of the colony feel that they knew what was going on.

So when there was something to be talked about that everybody probably shouldn't hear, they started the meeting with the most mind-numbingly dull items they could find until all listeners had left. Then they got down to business.

"The short of it is that the climatology team's assumption that Promise works like Earth wasn't quite true," Samantha said. "And since we placed our meteorology measurement stations according to Earth best practice, we've missed that until now."

She was standing in front of the free-standing whiteboard they put up when they had meetings. So far, there was nothing written on it. Around the table in front of her sat Janet, lieutenant Greensmith and the heads of the supply, construction and strategic planning groups.

"What does this mean, in practical terms?" asked the head of strategic planning, a 30-something woman by the name of Kate Tailor.

"First, the winter is going to last a lot longer than we thought. Our current best estimate is another 26 Earth months," Samantha said. "Fortunately, it shouldn't get any colder than it is now, so we should be able to deal with that."

Tailor nodded. "Yes," she said. "Not fun, but not a disaster either."

"The bad part is the wind," Samantha continued. "We now expect that to reach about 40 meters per second over the next few weeks, and stay there for the next twenty months."

"That's one hell of a storm," the head of construction said. She was the youngest of them, a slim, dark woman by the name of Sonya Macek.

Samantha nodded. "The local ecosystem has adapted to it," she said. "The branches of the firs entangle, and form a kind of roof. Below it, there will be almost no wind at all."

"So what's the problem?" Greensmith said.

"The problem is," Janet said, "that we cleared away a whole lot of trees to build the village. We don't have any protection against the wind."

Samantha nodded. "Exactly."

Lisa Hudson from strategic planning sighed. "So what do we do?" she said. "A couple of weeks is nowhere near enough to move the entire village in under the trees. Can we wind-proof the buildings somehow?"

"Nope," Macek said. "Simply don't have the materials. The way we've built things so far, they should stand up to maybe 20 meters per second. Any more, and they're going to get really drafty."

"Um, actually," Samantha said, "I think we do have a construction material that might do."

"Oh yeah?" Macek said. "And where have you hidden that?"

Samantha smiled a little.

"In the wells," she said. "At the temperatures we're going to have for the next two years, ice is as strong as concrete. All we have to do is figure out a decent reinforcement material and a way to apply it to the buildings. The pumps are already designed to be good down to minus forty or so, and we have plenty of power to run them."

Macek blinked. "Ice," she said. "Yeah, I guess that could work. The norwegians used it back home, didn't they?"

Samantha nodded. "For temporary harbors in the Arctic. They reinforced the ice with straw."

"Hard to get straw from under the snow," Macek said. "But we can start out using packing material from all the crates from Earth. Yeah, this could really work."

"Do it," Janet said. "Wake people up and start right now. We don't know how much time we have. Start with the warehouses, workshops and the like. Do homes last. If we don't finish them in time, people can sleep in the dining hall, or we can convert a couple of workshops back into dormitories."

Macek stood up.

"Yes, sir," she said and hurried off.

Samantha and Janet walked back to their homes through the wind and cold. Louisa and Samantha had built their house as close to Janet's as politically possible, on Samantha's insistence, so they were headed in the same direction. Occasionally, Samantha wondered if that had really been such a good idea. It made it very hard to forget Janet's existence.

Not that she would have even if she hadn't seen her house from her bedroom window.

"Do you know how glad I am that you came here?" Janet said.

Samantha shrugged. "Sonya is smart," she said. "She would've figured out the ice thing eventually."

"But probably not before we had some losses," Janet said. "This way, with a bit of luck, we won't lose anything. How did you figure it out anyway, when the meteorologists missed it for months?"

"The ice boars' hearing," Samantha said.

Janet frowned inside her heavy fur-lined hood.

"The ice boars' hearing is crap," she said.

"Exactly," Samantha said. "While Earth boars have excellent hearing. So something made good hearing not be an evolutionary advantage here. And, well, howling wind for three years out of every four would do that. Once I thought of that I moved a couple of measuring stations up above the treetops, we plugged the new data into the models and there we were."

"The influence of boar's ears on climatology," Janet said. "How are you with butterflies in far-off countries?"

"I'll let you know when I run into one."

Janet laughed. The sound of it made Samantha feel unreasonably happy.

"I stand by my earlier statement," Janet said. "I am so glad that you came here."

Suddenly, she reached her arms up, grabbed Samantha's hood, pulled her down and gave her a quick kiss on the lips.

Samantha's mind went blank. The instant froze, as if the intense night cold had suddenly permeated her brain. All there was was an eternal moment where Janet's lips touched hers.

Janet let her go again. Their faces were still only a handspan apart.

"Um," Janet said, suddenly looking nervous. "I'll see you in the morning, ok?"

"Yeah, sure," Samantha's mouth said with only marginal input from her brain. "In the morning."

Janet turned and quickly walked off towards her house.

The next few weeks were hectic. Sonya Macek and Samantha took turns overseeing the ice-reinforcement of the village, Sonya doing the day shift and Samantha the nights. When she wasn't busy with that, Samantha tried to keep track of the weather. Day by day, satellite photos showed huge pressure systems building symmetrically on each side of the equator, systems that they now were sure would remain stable for the many months that would pass before the planet again wobbled its eccentric way close to its sun. Day by day, the winds grew stronger and the ice work got more frantic. Samantha kept a kind of countdown on a big piece of paper on the dining hall wall. This is how much wind our non-reinforced houses will take. This is how strong the wind is now. This is how fast it grows. This is when the curves intersect in a howl of broken timber and shattered belongings.

With one week to go until the red zone, neither Samantha nor Janet or Sonya slept at all. There were too many houses and too little time. Reluctantly, the triage of homes began. Samantha made sure that Janet's house got treated early, and was too tired to care that her own and Louisa's remained to be done. The world turned into a continuous nightmare of darkness, freezing cold, ice and merciless wind. Exhaustion turned her into an automaton, a being with no feelings or reactions other than those needed to get the work done. Other people were like shadows around her.

When they finally lost the race against time and the wind started tearing the house she was working on apart, what she felt as the huge logs came tumbling over her was an intense sense of relief.

Slowly, Samantha drifted into consciousness. Time passed, and all of a sudden she remembered having been awake for a little while, while also remembering not having known that a moment ago. Consciousness brought with it a feeling of softness and warmth, the sound of howling wind in the distance and a dull constant ache. She tried to move her hand, and the ache exploded into slashing knives of pain. She gasped.

"Samantha?" a voice said. Janet's voice. "Are you awake?"

With an effort, Samantha opened her eyes. Above her was a slanted ceiling made from logs. Drying herbs hung from lines stretched from one side of the room to the other. She knew those herbs. She'd gathered quite a few of them herself, and hung them on the lines in Janet's bedroom.

"What happened?" she said. The slashing pain punctuated every breath she took.

"Your house collapsed," Janet said. "You got an entire wall over you. Fortunately you fell into the snow, so you weren't entirely crushed, but you have several cracked ribs and probably a concussion."

The pain looked like a huge red-black thing squeezing her field of vision.

"Hurts," she said.

"I'll get you some more morphine," Janet said. "Try to sleep, if you can."

There was a pinprick in her arm, and soon after she sank back down into blessed darkness.

The next time she woke up was more abrupt. She just opened her eyes and was awake. There were much fewer aches and pains, and she felt rested and clear-headed. Tight bandages encircled her chest, making it a little hard to breathe. Which was a vast improvement over the pain she dimly remembered from before. Slowly and with effort, Samantha sat up in the bed.

She was still in Janet's bedroom, which was a mess. Trays with half-eaten meals littered the large table, together with a lot of coffee mugs. Wrappers and containers for used medical supplies were thrown in the corners. Clothes lay strewn randomly around the room. Just about the only well-ordered part was the bedside table, on which non-used medical supplies were carefully lined up.

And, finally, on the hard wooden floor next to the bed, lay a sleeping Janet Fraiser.

Samantha sat looking at her until she woke up.

"Hi," she said as a still sleep-confused Janet looked up at her.

"Oh," Janet said. "Hi. How are you feeling?"

"Pretty good, considering," she said. "How long have you been here? And why am I not in the infirmary? I hope it hasn't been damaged?"

Janet sat up and shook her head to clear it. She reached out for a coffee mug, and quickly swallowed a few mouthfuls of room-temperature black liquid.

"The infirmary is fine," she said.

Samantha waited for the rest of the answer.

Janet got up from the floor.

"Do you think you're up for eating something?" she said. "I took you off the IV a while ago, so you should be getting hungry soon."

Samantha frowned. "IV? How long have I been lying here?"

"It's been four and a half days since the accident," Janet said. "You've been here since then."

Samantha just looked at her, letting the earlier question fill the silence.

"I, um," Janet said, not quite looking Samantha in the eyes. "I just couldn't stand having somebody else treat you. I had to make sure it got done right."

Samantha smiled. "Thank you," she said. "And I am getting hungry."

"Right," Janet said. She picked up a radio and spoke briefly to someone in the kitchens. Then she sat down in a chair at the foot of the bed.

"Food will be here soon," she said.

Samantha leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. She was already getting tired again.

"I shouldn't be doing this," Janet said.

Samantha opened her eyes.

"What?" she said.

"I shouldn't be treating you like this. I should have let them take you to the infirmary like anybody else."

There were tears in her eyes, on the verge of spilling out.

"But I panicked," she continued. "When I saw those huge logs fall over you, I just panicked. I didn't care what happened to anybody or anything else, I just had to make sure that you got saved."

Samantha kept silent. She didn't know what to say.

"I don't think I can be your friend any more," Janet said, and now the tears were running down her cheeks.

Samantha's heart stopped. Or, at least, it felt like it did.

"What?" she said. "Why?"

"Because I'm not your friend," Janet said. "I haven't been for months. I'm in love with you. I don't know when or where or how it happened, but I am. I'm sorry. I'll just have to keep my distance from you."

The stopped heart inside Samantha started beating again, and its fuel was, to her own surprise, anger. No, something stronger than that. Fury. Cold, barely under control fury.

"Like hell you will," she said. "I won't accept that. If you go, I'll follow. I came here because I thought there might be a chance for a good life here, and there is. There is good work to be done. There is good people who I can help. There is a community to help build. There is a wonderful, beautiful woman to love, who just told me she loves me back. I'm not going to lose any of that. I've lost enough already, we all have. I'm not taking it any more."

She paused to catch her breath. Janet looked at her with a mixed expression on her face.

"I'm the commander here," she said. "I can't be in a relationship with any of my subordinates."

"Says who?" Samantha said. "The Pentagon? They're not there any more."

"Social dynamics," Janet said. "It's no good in the long run. People get wrong ideas."

"They already treat me like your second-in-command," Samantha said. "Everybody already knows that our relationship is more than professional. So that's no excuse."

"Never the less," Janet said. "I'll stay alone."

Samantha stared at her.

"Do you intend for the colony to fail?" she said.

Janet frowned. "What?"

"Well, that's the signal you'll be sending out, isn't it? That we should look back, adhere to old rules that no longer apply. That doing things like they've always been done is more important than living."

"That's not..." Janet started. Samantha interrupted her.

"You could do the opposite, you know," she said. "Lead by example. Show the way forward. Show that you at least are planning for a future. Build a life. Get a family. Be a beacon of hope for everybody else."

For a time, they looked at each other in silence.

"I'm trying to think of why I can't do that," Janet said. "I can't come up with anything. But I'm not sure if that's because there isn't anything, or because I just want it too much."

"The people who planned this colony meant for there to be families," Samantha said. "They meant for us to grow and prosper. I can't imagine they meant for you alone to stand outside of that."

She could see a wave of relief pass through Janet. The worry and tears on her face were replaced by a smile. A tired and wan one, but still a smile.

"So what happens now?" Janet said.

"If I get to decide," Samantha said, "you come over here and give me a good, long kiss."

Janet got up from her chair and walked over to the bed. She sat down next to Samantha. She started putting her arms around her, and leaned forward into a warm embrace.

Samantha screamed.

Instantly, Janet jumped back.

"Oh my god!" she said. "Your ribs! I'm so sorry!"

Samantha blinked away the tears of agony that blurred her vision. With the pressure gone, the pain was fading fast.

"That's all right," she said. "I asked for it, didn't I?"

"I'm your doctor," Janet said. "I should've known better."

"I still want a kiss," Samantha said.

Carefully, Janet sat back down on the edge of the bed. She leaned forward as gently as she possibly could. Their lips met, and opened into delight.

Future

After more than two Earth years of winter, spring was unbelievably welcome. After more than two years of constant howling storm, clear blue sky and soft winds were like a dream come true. The human village's houses lost their supporting ice coverings. The wind-powered generators that had let them save their Earth-provided Naquitar reactors for future need was being replaced by ones harnessing rivers of melted snow coming down the mountain. Fields were being cleared, and seeds were getting ready to be planted. Fresh shoots from the forest were already supplementing their diets. Life was, in short, quite good. The colony had lived through the winter, and knowing what would be coming made them feel certain that they'd make it through the next one just fine.

Boss Fraiser was pacing back and forth in front of the recently de-iced infirmary, paying no attention either to the warmth of spring or the sunshine. Her face was set into a frown, that occasionally deepened into a scowl as she looked up at lieutenant Greensmith on the infirmary porch.

"Remember, you ordered me to do this," Greensmith said, waving his P90 assault rifle in the general direction of Janet.

"I know," she said. "And I regret it."

"Sam wants it," he pointed out.

Janet clenched her hands into fists.

"I know," she said. "That's kind what makes this hard instead of impossible."

From inside the infirmary, a bloodcurdling scream came.

Janet stopped her pacing and winced.

"A few more like that and I will go in!" she said.

"In which case you ordered me to shoot you," Greensmith said.

Janet looked at him.

"Come on," she said. "You wouldn't shoot me."

"Have I ever disobeyed one of your orders?" he said.

Janet glared at him, then resumed her pacing. She had already worn a visible path in the fragile spring grass. She hated this kind of waiting with a passion. As long as it was anything medical, she wanted to be in there and in control. But this time Sam had convinced her that she'd be too emotionally involved to be reliable, and she should stay outside. It wasn't even as if it was a procedure, as such. It was a straightforward part of life, as old as the species. So she waited, and she paced, as the hours passed and the slightly too yellow sun traveled slowly across the slightly too blue sky.

An eternity later, the door opened. Janet had long since decided that something had gone seriously wrong and everyone inside the infirmary was long dead. Of old age.

"She can come in now," Louisa said.

Janet was up on the porch and through the door before Greensmith had even put aside his rifle. She stormed though the waiting room into the little six-bed ward where she knew Sam would be. Pulse racing, she forced herself to slow down before the walked in.

In the bed closest to the window Sam sat. The spring sunlight shone on her, glinting off her blonde hair. Hair that was mussed and sweaty, sticking out every which way. Sam herself looked worn and tired, and had the most beatific smiled on her face that Janet had ever seen.

In Sam's arms, held against her bared chest, a small dark-haired bundle suckled her first meal.

Janet stopped dead, unsure what to do. Sam looked up at her.

"Hey," she said. "Why are you all the way over there?"

Carefully, so as not to disturb the baby, Janet approached and sat down on the bed. She reached out and gently caressed the small, downy-haired head.

"Say welcome to Promise's first native," Sam said. "Isn't she beautiful?"

"Very," Janet said. "Welcome, little one."

They sat there, watching, while the baby drank her fill and fell asleep. In the distance, the infirmary staff cleaned away the remains of the birth.

"Have you decided which name you want to give her yet?" Janet asked.

"Yes," Sam said.

She looked into her beloved's eyes and smiled.

"Cassandra," she said. "Your daughter's name is Cassandra."

Comments

[elfcat255.livejournal.com]

oh I loved this...yay!...you could make a series out of this AU world...would be very interesting to see what else happens in theit lives and what struggles the colonies go through...great writing!

[eclecticfan.livejournal.com]

"Cassandra," she said. "Your daughter's name is Cassandra."

2x in one story - for me this has got to be about a record

::sniff::

Interesting place you developed with 3 year winters and Sam's solution

Janet's mini breakdown was very realistic along with Earth's distruction and the negative issues with the other outposts - since when it gets bad it tends to get awfully bad.

very neat universe you created

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thanks :-)

To be honest, I'm not sure that planet is at all plausible. But it's no less so than many things on the show, so I don't worry :-) And Earth isn't destroyed, it's just that the SGC gate is blocked so they get the Antarctica gate instead when they dial in.

[kirylyn.livejournal.com]

WOW!!!!

/blinks a couple of times

WICKED!!! Janet is a B5 fan!!! YES!!!!!

/also votes for more stories in the series!!!

PS. I hope you don't mind that I friended you!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I've long had a feeling that Janet is a die-hard Ivanova fan.

And thanks for the praise, but I very much doubt I will write more about this world. After here, it'd pretty much be original fic rather than fanfic, and if I'm going to do that I have many other ideas ahead of it in the mental queue.

Of course I don't mind. No promises that you won't get bored out of your skull, though...

[triggerhappy.livejournal.com]

Wow. Wow.
Very well done and agree with the 'you could make a series' sentiment.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for the nice feedback, but as stated above there almost certainly won't be any sequels to this.

[celievamp.livejournal.com]

excellent story!

[replicarter22.livejournal.com]

Oh my lord, MORRRREEEE!

I love this reality, it reminds me of the Raising Melosa (http://ausxip.com/fanfiction/rm/index.html) series.

Thank you so much for a GREAT night of reading :D

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Funnily enough, I never managed to get into the Raising Melosa series. Not even back when Xena altfic was just about all the fanfic I read. But I know it's highly regarded, so I take the comparison as praise :-)

[mrswoman.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this wonderful story.

I went back to read the first part, then the two new parts so that's why I'm a couple of days late commenting, but when I actually got going I couldn't stop.

Just loved how Janet had become the Boss, loved how Alt Sam just knew what she wanted, and loved how you wrote this :)

Once again... thanks.

[ex-katiedamm852.livejournal.com]

How happy am I to have gone poking about for Sam/Jan today?

This was excellent. I hope you'll consider entering it in the Teryl Rothery Contest (http://terylicious.net/contest_3/), because it really deserves as wide an audience as possible.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I'm too lazy :-) You're perfectly welcome to enter it for me, if you wish.

[siggy63.livejournal.com]

This is a great story. Except for naming Janet 'Boss'I kept seeing her with mirrored sunglasses a shotgun and a beer gut!I really liked your OC's as well. Thanks for a really entertaining read.

[slamaina.livejournal.com]

Great story. I sincerly hope you keep writting Sam & Janet.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Lately I haven't been writing anything at all, since work is using up nearly all my energy :-(

But thanks for all the nice comments! Feedback does increase the likelihood of more stories.

[slamaina.livejournal.com]

This is one of my all time favorite stories.

Slam