Shipping It Stargate Style [Worm/Stargate]

Shipping It Stargate Style

Chapter 01

Unending Odyssey​

In one universe of one multiverse, a girl was trapped in her locker by her one time almost sister, now mortal enemy.



In one universe of an entirely different multiverse, far away across the sea of existence, a starship was exploding from the beam of energy that lanced through it.



The girl screamed one final time before her vocal cords broke.



The ship… began to put itself back together.



If it was just a temporal reversion, the fabric of that universe wouldn't have cared. Much.



But the people on that ship sought to bring something back.



Even with that, the universe would've probably been okay. An uninhabited galaxy or two burned away to solve the paradox. Not really a problem.



However, the inhabitants of teat ship tried to bring back a person.



A soul.



One of the most complex forms of matter an energy possible. The apex of the path every universe’s collapse-expand cycle set forth upon.



So much information, and so temporally sensitive, that the fabric of that universe tore itself apart.



It was only put back together by the frantic efforts of that universe's ascended beings.



They were left with a conundrum, because there were now two occurrences of the ship and everyone on it.



One was fine, and was about to initiate the time bubble. It had the displaced soul, which, despite all the chaos, arrived safe and sound.



The other ship, still locked in a time bubble, was almost completely destroyed.



The ascended did what this universe's particular blend always did to solve problems. Out of sight, out of mind.



They tossed the timelocked ship out of their multiverse.



The entire aborted timeline, ship included, was ejected into the space and time between space or time. Wrapped up in a tiny little universe barely 500 meters across.



It traveled for unknown eons, occasionally pinging off other multiverses like a pinball in an arcade machine. Some of the collisions had effects on the contents of the tiny universe, despite their paused state.



One gave the ship sentience.



Another gave it a soul.



Yet another imbued it and the people on it with the gift of Magic.



Finally, one multiverse didn't reject it. This one had been so damaged by a race composed of faulty Clarketech that the ship was able to slip right in.



It glanced off another tiny travelling spirit, both redirecting its course and imparting the ability to come back as a human looking girl if it ever was destroyed.



Given it was in the process of being destroyed, this activated, turning the people on board into tiny faeries and the ship into a girl. Time was still paused inside the tiny universe though, and as such, the mind of the ship failed to form.



Such are the perils of tampering with time. Not that this eventuality would end up teaching the ascended of the ship's origin universe anything. As one of their order, exiled and forced to fight by their unjust inaction, was so fond of cryptically saying; ‘if you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.’



Their candlelight had been recognized as fire long ago, yet they'd rejected it due to their memories of a different type of fire.



Regardless of happenings across the sea of existence, the ship slammed into a piece of the Clarketech race that was responsible for the damage of this multiverse. Powerful, spacetime manipulating supercomputers they might be, but the power of Magic and tons of extreme ‘velocity’, as much as that term can apply to what exists outside space and time, built up over ‘eons’ of ‘travel’, were behind the ship's little universe.



The ship ate the planet sized piece of Clarketech like it was a snack. At the same time, due to the collision, the ship experienced its final course correction.



On January 3rd, 2011, the U.S.A.F. Odyssey slammed straight into Taylor Hebert. Due to their severely weakened states, the two became one being, merging into a sum greater than both parts.



And she woke up.

---

Stars, two beings spiraling around each other-



-screaming battle enemies explosions shields down hull damage pain-



-ages long sedate unmoving low power safe-



-frozen cast out collision more collisions change entry collision change consumption assimilate merge-



Taylor woke with a gasp, banging her head on her locker.



And promptly stared in shock at the impression of her face staring back at her from the metal.



“W-What?” she tried to say, her surprise over her own face staring out of the metal of her locker overriding the panic and fear and disgust she felt at her location.



Which she somehow knew the exact statistics of, down to the millimeter.



Her core was thrumming with unexpected new life and her crew were scrambling to figure out what went wrong with the temporal reversion-



Crew? Core? Temporal reversion?! Taylor asked herself. She shook her head to try and remove the certainties she knew to be true. What the hell is going on?



She half heartedly banged on the locker door once more, momentarily chalking it up to her going crazy.



She also instinctively fired her sublight engines.



The poor metal door didn't just fly off the locker, it disintegrated against the force and power of engines capable of accelerating her to a full 80% of lightspeed in a few seconds.



WHAT THE FUCK?! Taylor screamed in her own head, pushing herself away from the now missing door and into the sludge on her back.



The sludge which was being repelled by a shimmering blue-white field, bright enough to light up the locker from the inside.



Her shields.



Before she could fully contemplate their existence her sublight engines flared again, forcing her hull through the back of the locker and a solid foot into the concrete wall.



“HOLY FUCKING SHIT!” Taylor screamed, her vocal cords repaired by her merge.



She hesitantly straightened up and shimmied the distance back to her locker, looking back at the impression of her spread eagled body now almost literally punched into the wall.



She hadn't even felt the impact. The wall provided about as much of an obstacle as a spider's web.



“Sublight engines?” Taylor asked herself under her breath, almost jumping when she received a status report on their functionality. She only managed to hold herself back with the knowledge that yes, the top of her locker, and indeed the school itself, would pose just as much of an obstacle to her as the wall had if she traveled upward.



They didn't even register on her collision detection systems. They were just there.



Oh, and she had a hyperdrive too apparently, whatever both of those even meant!



Taylor started to hyperventilate. She stumbled out of her locker, her sublight engines helpfully indicating their status of being barely a hundredth of a percent engaged.



Then, came the voices.



“Colonel, what the hell is going on with the ship?” a nice sounding, if old, man asked.



“I don't know Cam, I've never seen anything like this!” a woman's voice answered. “The Odyssey's doing things all in it's own.”



Odyssey.



That name rang true in Taylor's head. It felt as much her name as Taylor did.



U.S.A.F. X-304 Daedalus Class Deep Space Carrier Odyssey, her well of new knowledge and senses informed her.



U.S.A.F? Taylor asked herself. She blinked when the answer came to her, not from her new stuff but from her… previous? knowledge. United States Air Force? Deep Space Carrier?!



“Maybe the ship got so bored of being trapped in this time bubble it evolved its own sentience?” a rather mischievous, slightly European sounding woman said sarcastically.



Her voice made Taylor want to hide her valuables. Several of her armories and cargo bays proceeded to seal shut, almost subconsciously.



Because apparently she had those now.



“Oh come on, that's crazy,” a fourth man dismissed her.



Crazy. Right.



Like the voice in her head had any room to talk.



The voices were silent for several seconds. Taylor worried that they'd heard her silent thoughts up until the same man continued.



“Right, guys?” he hesitantly asked for confirmation.



“Well we do have the Asgard core on board…” the first woman began to try and reason.



“No way. Nuh uh. I draw the line at alive ships,” the first man said flatly.



“Well why don't we just ask?” the second woman reasoned. “And hey, has anyone seen Muscles around? I thought he was supposed to be going back in time or something.”



Taylor was pretty sure she was crazy. She'd obviously snapped in the locker. Maybe… maybe she was still in there.



Hallucinating all this.



“Fine! Fine! Hey Odyssey, here's a dumb question but apparently we should ask it anyways: anybody home?!” the second man sounded like an angry old grandpa.



Taylor saw no reason to not indulge her mental break. She was already far gone enough to experience all of this. Not much more to go.



She tried to feel for a way to reply to them and got something called a comm system back in response. She, trembling, tried to pipe her voice through it and into the room the four of them were in.



She barely registered it being the engine room. Her engine room.



“H-hello?” she called out.



Two of them, the first man and the second woman, jumped with surprise. The second man just dropped his arms and let his head flop back with defeat.



The first woman gulped. Taylor could see all this through something called the internal sensors. Because she had those now too, apparently. “Hi,” she said to the ceiling, shivering slightly. “Uh… who are you?”



“Y-You’re the voices in my head, you tell me!” Taylor shot back.



Suddenly she found dossiers on all of them pulling up in her vision. Colonel Samantha Carter. Colonel Cameron Mitchell. Vala mal Doran.Doctor Daniel Jackson.



“Nevermind, whatever this insanity is just told me,” she informed them. A thought of wanting the things to go away made them disappear.



Sam blinked several more times, then set her face sternly. “Are you the Odyssey?” she asked, the tone of disbelief on her voice very clear.



“I-” Taylor started, then hesitated. She felt like the Odyssey. It… fit. Just seemed... right.



But her human sense was still not going along for the ride her instincts were trying to sell her. Something wasn't right, something was off.



Oh god. Maybe this was a cape Mastering her. That had to be it.



She saw the feeling of off as the only evidence of her possible real self fighting back against whatever Mastering was going on. To keep herself from falling any further into the illusion, Taylor clutched to that feeling like a lifeline. Then, she tried again. “No. No, I'm not. I'm Taylor. I don't know what this crazy shit is but you'd better stop it!”



Wait… but if the voices were part of the Mastering...



Taylor's eyes widened in sudden realization. “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” she screamed at the possible invaders.



Her ship systems immediately went to full red alert. But she ignored that because it wasn't possible.



“We're not in your head, kid!” Cameron fired back. “We're on a ship! What are you doing in its head?!”



“BULLSHIT!” Taylor fired back. “You're trying to- to mind control me or something!”



Cameron blinked and proceeded to stare at her ceiling with disbelief. “Mind control.” He snorted and shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about? That's not even possible!” he continued.



His complete lack of belief, not even in the idea that he could be mind controlling she, but in the concept of it in the first place, made a chink in Taylor's mental armor. “Mind control!” she insisted. “like Mastering!”



Daniel interrupted whatever Cameron was about to say. “Alright, I can't be the only one who heard a capital letter there,” he remarked.



“Uh, guys,” Vala spoke up. This interrupted Taylor from continuing the discussion. Not due to her words, but their time and, more importantly, just where and in front of what she was standing.



Vala was looking at one of the monitors that showed the outside. She'd previously been looking at the screen that showed the Odyssey’s status.



And a screen for Taylor's external sensors. Displaying her surroundings. In her school.



“Not now, Vala!” Daniel scolded her.



“Oooh no,” Vala shot back. “You do not get to do that to me anymore!”



“We're trying to negotiate with the entity that's taken over our ship and you're going to do this NOW?!” Daniel yelled back.



“Yes!” Vala fired off. “Because you've got it all wrong!”



“STOP IT, ALL OF YOU!” Taylor screamed, collapsing to her knees and hiding her face. She just wanted this to go away!



The ‘ship’ they were on went dark. She'd shut down power to everything but life support and the internal sensors.



“Sam,” Daniel asked pleasantly after a few moments. “What just happened?”



Sam tried to place a crystal down on the very unique console at the back of the engine room. It clunked against the glass-like surface uselessly. “Damn it!” she cursed. “I have no idea!”



“Maybe we upset the poor girl who is also now our ship?” Vala tersely suggested, her arms crossed.



The three others looked at her with dumbfounded expressions.



“You really should learn to listen to me more,” she deadpanned, her tone kind of hurt.



“What the hell do you mean, girl who is our ship?” Cameron asked.



Vala grinned and looked at the ceiling. “Taylor?” she asked sweetly. “Would you turn the lights back on please?”



Taylor really didn't want to. Really didn't. She… was probably being Mastered.



But she looked at the remains of her locker and grimaced. Something was going on. Something immensely screwed up. Most likely Mastering.



But.



There was a small chance it was something else.



Maybe… maybe she'd triggered in her locker.



It certainly fit. She shuddered as she briefly recalled the experience. Something like that was definitely Trigger Event worthy.



And maybe, just maybe, her power was weird. Perhaps it gave her four voices in her head to talk to.



She was always alone. And it was uncommon knowledge on PHO, but not rare knowledge, that the powers someone got always reflected themselves and their Trigger Event.



Taylor had no idea how becoming a ship was related to being trapped in a school locker, but the voices to talk to part matched what she knew.



She'd prefer to believe her new theory over the one where she was being Mastered.



So, hesitantly, Taylor searched herself for a way to follow… Vala’s request. After a few moments she found it. The control panel for… herself, was a set of simple switches in her mind she'd flipped on instinct in her panic. She hesitated, closed her eyes, and flipped them back on.



The systems of the ship all came back online. And Taylor watched her new… crew with the eyes of a hawk, powered by Asgard sensors.



She would need to figure out just what the help those were later on. If she was going with the ‘voices are part of her power’ theory, she needed to a certain just what kind of voices they were.



Her world didn't exactly have a good history with capes who heard voices. The Butcher and The Fairy Queen being just two well known examples.



The fact those capes happened to be ludicrously powerful seemingly in exchange Taylor pushed to the side for now.



“There, see?” Vala presented smugly. “I told you. I was right!”



“Vala, a girl cannot be a starship!” Sam lamented, sighing.



Vala stepped closer to the sensor screen and pointed. “Well then you tell me, Sam, how the outside of the Odyssey shows a Tau'ri school?”



The three of them stared at her for several seconds, dumbfounded.



Then they reluctantly stepped over to the screen.



And stared it for several more seconds. Sam was the one having the hardest time accepting what her eyes were telling her, given the look of absolute disbelief on her face.



“Holy Hannah,” Cameron exclaimed.



Sam’s eyes widened. She looked at the ceiling again. “Um… Taylor?”



“What?” Taylor replied, wary of them yelling again, even as she closed out of the molecular scan she'd accidentally started running on them.



“Where are you right now?” she asked, the struggle to believe Taylor's sensors still quite clear.



“I-I’m on the floor outside my locker,” she said, choking up. “Hugging my knees.”



The four of them looked back down at her sensor screen.



“That certainly looks like a pair of legs and arms hugging them,” Daniel dryly remarked.



“This is impossible!” Sam refuted. “Ships… don't just suddenly become humans!”



“Oh no, no, but humans and ships shrinking,” Daniel snarked back, pushing his glasses back up his nose, “that's, that's okay?”



“Uh, guys?” Cameron asked, interrupting the bickering non siblings. He tapped a section of the screen. It zoomed in on Taylor's arm. “What's that?”



Taylor hurriedly hid her arm out of view of that particular visual sensor- eye. “Nothing.”



Vala’s face darkened. “It looked like feminine refuse, Cam,” she said.



Taylor began whimpering and curled in on herself further. Vala had- she'd brought up something Taylor was trying very hard to forget. She was trying to scrutinize her new teammates, not… not melt down.



But everything was finally catching up to her, overriding the shock she'd experienced at the various feats of absurdity she had suddenly become capable of. The contemplation that her sister… ex-sister, now, especially after this, had tried to kill her.



She wasn't in the best headspace, and the torrent of tears that erupted from her eyes, washing over her visual sensors- her eyes, to drip onto the cold school's floor, proved it. She couldn't focus on her scans anymore. Couldn't do anything but hug herself and cry.



The thought to appear as anything other than how emotionally fucked up she was at that moment never entered her head. She believed the voices in her head to be only that, after all. Just voices. Mastering or parts of her power, they were just… voices.



The people on board Taylor were silent. They'd noticed her plight, through the sensor screens. The four members of the premier team of intergalactic explorers, each battle-hardened warriors and seasoned negotiators, looked to each other in silent dares to be the first one to breach the topic.



It inevitably fell to the less reserved woman present. Vala shot a narrow eyed glare at Sam, Daniel, and Cameron, but closed her eyes and sighed with acceptance.



“Taylor,” Vala hesitantly spoke up, laying a comforting hand on the console in front of her, a gesture that Taylor somehow felt, “what happened?”



Taylor's breath hitched in her chest. She hastily wiped her eyes in an attempt to get the tears to go away. “N-Nothing,” she half heartedly stammered.



“You don't seem like the kind of person who cries over nothing,” she fired back.



Taylor had nothing to say. She just continued to sob, trying and failing to do so silently. Her continual leg hugging had reached the point that her sublight engines engaged. Due to a quirk of her new- old- merged existence, their output was dumped straight into shoving her reconfigured hangar bays - arms against her legs.



Taylor jolted a bit with surprise. Her legs. She- she thought of them as her legs first. She didn't have to correct herself.



The advent of that little bit of normal in her otherwise insane new existence broke what little control she had left. Taylor curled in further, stressing her shields, and hid her face in her knees. She proceeded to let the pain, sorrow, and misery of her last two years out through choked sobs and muted wailing.



It was a very long time before she stopped.

 

Shipping It Stargate Style

Chapter 2

Welcome to Bet​

“Taylor?” Vala hesitantly spoke up. She hadn't stopped massaging the engineering console. The soothing feelings of another human's touch that washed over the new ship girl when she did that had helped Taylor keep from breaking down completely.



“Y-Yeah?” she sniffled. She was rubbing her eyes with her hands, trying to get rid of the blurry vision her tears caused.



“Will you tell us what happened now?”



Taylor instinctively began to vehemently shake her head… and stopped.



What was the harm, exactly?



They were voices. And part of her powers. She'd basically be talking to herself.



It was just Emma's mental hooks that made her afraid of examining her own emotions.



Huh. Taylor had just discovered that she had a human and Asgard psychology database. Those would be pretty useful in the future.



She shook her head one final time and gave in. “Okay,” she agreed.



Vala blinked with surprise. “Wait, really?”



“Y-Yeah. Gotta tell somebody and you're just voices in my head that come from my powers so I'd basically be talking to myself,” Taylor reasoned. She put a hand on the ground and pushed off. Incredibly small thrusts of her sublight engines accompanied the action.



However, even at such a low thrust, the reaction was not what she was anticipating. As Cameron had once said: ‘this tub only goes so slow.’



Granted that was on her sister ship the Daedalus, one who hadn't yet had all the Asgard upgrades she now contained, and she resented being called a tub, but the point was valid!



Also, she had sister ships? Those might be other people nearby who'd triggered at the same time as she did. Multi-triggers did usually get similar powers.



Taylor's small bout of introspective curiosity promptly ceased as her engines flared and ended up making her perform a large tumble into the air. She reoriented towards the planet's surface via some automatic alignment processes she didn't even know she had and landed in the stereotypical three point superhero impact pose.



In a slight dent in the concrete school floor.



Taylor's eyes shot wide open as she scrambled to her feet.



Both she and her crew were speechless. Taylor because she was examining her hands, legs, and engines in awed wonder, and her crew because of what she just did.



“Okay. I'm going to need someone to pinch me,” Daniel announced.



“Tell me we didn't just see our ship, who is also now a girl, crater pavement by landing on it,” Cameron continued, shocked to hell and back.



Vala shook her head, never ceasing her ministrations of Taylor's engineering console. “Can't do that, love.”



“Why not?” Cameron challenged her sarcastically.



Sam owned the pair of the widest eyes out of the four of them, not counting Taylor. “Because that is what just happened, Cam.” She blinked and raised a hand to rub her forehead. “I don't know how it happened, but that is what happened.”



“Holy shit,” Taylor lamented. A genuine grin was starting to grow on her lips. She clenched her fists and felt the raw power available to her.



And then, something just… clicked.



The building pressure in her head and the weight on her soul she hadn't even known were there evaporated. Taylor Hebert suddenly felt fully like the Odyssey, and the Odyssey felt like Taylor Hebert.



Her massive generators, both Human and Asgard, thrummed alongside the pulse of her blood. Their energies were waiting to be called to the various weapon emplacements she carried on her arms and legs. Her new heart was ready to direct a torrent of raw energy towards her shields, her engines, and even prepared to channel into her Hyperdrive so that she could rip the fabric of spacetime open and launch herself into a realm where her top speed was ridiculously higher. She even had the ability to launch flights of F-302 fighters from the hangar bays wrapped around her arms.



As she had done so many times before.



Or, well, the Odyssey had.



Her crew. Well, what was left of them. She now knew for a fact they weren't just voices. They were four out of five total members of the premier team of Earth's intergalactic explorers, SG1. Their fifth member, Teal’c, had escaped the temporal reversal by hiding inside an isolation field Sam had her create.



He was probably back in the Odyssey's original universe. On a duplicate of the ship that had merged with Taylor.



That existence was gone now. Her crew might not realize it, but she did. Her scans of their surroundings had easily found the difference in the quantum signature of her new reality. That… sort of explained what had happened to her. Just a little. Or at least provided a remotely plausible explanation in a scenario almost completely devoid of one.



Nobody ever said cross-reality travel was simple.



But she was also Taylor. Her original human body was still there. Overlaid upon her hull. Their quantum signatures matched perfectly.



Earth Bet was the Odyssey’s reality now. Taylor was the Odyssey now. Moreover, it seemed her ship self had never really truly formed and was thus anchoring, pun unintended, onto her existence as Taylor. That… melding being incomplete was what had felt off before. And it had just finished.



Taylor relaxed her hands and spread her fingers. She easily located the emission ports of her Asgard Plasma Beam Weapons in the center of her palms. The devastating weapons were slightly hidden in another layer of reality, but that wasn't really a difficult obstacle for her sensors to cut through.



Her eyes traveled over the new location and shape of her primary hangar bays, an eyebrow raising at the sheer scale of the modifications needed to make them fit a humanoid body. They were wrapped around her forearms, underneath, almost like reverse gauntlets. On top of those same forearms were her primary railgun decks, also resembling gauntlets.



Her primary bridge sat atop her head like an abnormally flat, angular disk shaped hat. The large sheet of hull that served as the flattop of her class was split in two. One half sat astride each of her shoulders like pauldrons. Her secondary bridge, or flight control tower depending on which designer you asked, was on top of the left pauldron. The comm arrays that used to be on her nose now poked up past her ear from the right pauldron.



Taylor's missile silos had been relocated to a sort of backpack on her back, sticking up just past her shoulders. If she leaned her head back they could serve as a rather uncomfortable headrest. The weird backpack and the two extended arms coming off it and wrapping around her sides were the majority of her hull that wasn't part of her human body. They were connected by stylized versions of the massive extendable pylons that served to anchor her hangar bays to her main hull back when she was first built.



Because apparently whatever cosmic bullshit that had merged her with… her, had a sense of style.



As for her engines, they were distributed to different places on her new, old form. She was wearing what felt and looked like thigh high stomping boots with high heels but they were sections of her rear hull instead. Each heel housed the new location of one of her two primary sublight thrusters. Four out of three remaining six secondary thrusters were clustered around those primaries, two on each side, leading her heels to look thicker. The other two faced backwards along the outside of her forearms and had merged with her hangar/railgun deck gauntlets. Even though she looked like she was wearing short heels in one layer of reality, her sneakered feet were flat on the ground in… the real one?



Finally her hyperdrive emitters stuck out of the bottom of her backpack. They actually made it look sorta like one of those retro style jetpacks people thought were going to be all the rage back in the sixties.



In fact… Taylor almost felt like if she really wanted to, she could pull on her heavily modified ship self, manifest it around her humanoid body somehow. Then she would walk like she was wearing heels, because then she would be. At the moment… she wasn't?!



And… all of the bullshit that was her new form was giving her a powerful headache just trying to comprehend, much less make sense of. She decided to hold off on even attempting to continue mapping her new body or hull shape until she was recovered.



Taylor shook her head to rid her mind of the confusing information. She was in one piece, more or less, and that's what counted. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists again, and chuckled mirthfully.



There would be plenty of time for all of that later.



She opened her eyes and turned her heading towards the Locker. The place where her life as normal, wimpy Taylor Hebert changed forever.



And she smiled. A true, warm, happy smile. For the first time in over two years, she felt whole.



Well, until she saw the results of the scan she ran of her locker on instinct. At that… filth, she winced. But even so, that sense of right remained. Whatever holes in her heart Emma, Sophia, and Madison had torn open, the Odyssey was taking the place of them. She felt complete.



The feeling wasn't enough to fully counteract two years of extensive bullying culminating in a murder attempt but it was certainly sufficient for her to get her head in the game.



Taylor was also very thankful to whatever process merged her with the Odyssey for seemingly cleaning her, healing her injuries, and repairing her clothes.



...Although the second two might just be a quirk of her new existence as a ship.



“What the hell is that?” Cameron asked, drawing Taylor's attention back to the ongoing discussion of her crew.



“Toxic waste,” Vala answered, scrolling down her readout. “I don't think the Odyssey has data on exactly what kind though.”



“This is a school locker, right?” Cameron asked. “What kind of monsters put this shit in a school locker?”



“Bullies,” Taylor spoke out through her comm systems.



Vala’s face darkened. “Really,” she almost growled.



Daniel grimaced and sighed. “That's your locker,” he guessed, “isn't it.”



Taylor nodded her head. “Yes.”



“Why does it look like it lost a war with a piledriver?” Sam asked, poking her screens a couple of times to zoom in on the warped metal of the locker.



Taylor gently laid a hand on the edge, tracing her fingers over the scratches she'd made before she had become strong enough to pancake concrete. “In a way, it did. I wasn't very mentally present in my first few moments waking up again.”



Her crew went dead silent while they tried to figure out what she meant.



“Oh my gods,” Sam gasped, putting her hands over her mouth to keep herself from throwing up. She was the most intelligent one there. It didn't surprise Taylor that she got it first.



Vala was next and spoiled it for the boys. “Your bullies locked you in there with that refuse?!” she almost screeched. Her grip on Taylor’s engineering console became vicelike, her nails trying to dig into the metal and horribly failing.



“Yeah,” Taylor lamented sadly, taking a moment to fold the side of the locker like it was a piece of paper, “they did. The entire day. I eventually passed out after screaming so much my vocal cords broke. Then when I woke up, I was the Odyssey.”



Vala tried to grip even harder. Taylor wasn't concerned, her hull was made out of a trinium-naquadah-titanium alloy. Someone would have to try a lot harder to even so much as scratch her surfaces.



Alexandria might be able to give her a bruise.



Actually… No, that wouldn't work, would it?



Taylor's eyes shot wide open as she realized she was stronger, faster, and tougher than the Hero known for those traits on her world. For fuck’s sake, it was named the Alexandria Package for a reason!



But she outclassed the Package's namesake in pretty much every way.



As she thought about it further, of course she did. She was a starship. Alexandria was just a parahuman. Even more than that, Taylor was a military vessel with highly advanced, alien technology integrated into every system she had.



She would be very surprised if Alexandria could even dent her hull much less breach her shields. And given they seemed to be shaped very similar to Glory Girl's force field, clinging to her skin, she didn't have to worry about the Daedalus class’ original shielding matrix’s weakness of being able to get inside it.



If she really thought about it, there wasn't much that could threaten her on Earth Bet anymore. Behemoth, the dynakinetic Endbringer, and Scion were probably the only ones who could. She wasn't entirely human anymore, which hopefully negated the Simurgh from mind controlling her, and she could just pick up Leviathan and take him on a quick Hyperspace trip to the black hole in the center of the galaxy.



Taylor's eyes widened to their maximum when the final, full realization hit her.



She wasn't just a cape now. She… she could make a difference. A worldwide one.



Right. Time for her to substitute the lack of discipline she had as Taylor with what she seemed to have picked up as Odyssey. With her level of power comes not just great but massive responsibility.



“SG1,” she interrupted her crew's raging against her tormentors. While it was therapeutic, there were more important things to discuss now.



Daniel was the one who commented. “You know what that is?” he asked, surprised.



Taylor nodded and reached out for the perfect impression of her face she'd left in the locker wall. “Of course. I am the Odyssey, after all,” she informed them. A small part of her attention was on the metal in her hands as she moulded it as easily as she might do so to clay.



Another small part of her attention was marveling at the fact that she was that strong.



Her sublight engines seemed to translate directly into her humanoid strength. Which, upon thinking about it, made her obscenely strong.



Eighty percent of lightspeed in five seconds. A velocity change of sixty million meters per second, or roughly 197 million feet.



And she wasn't exactly a light ship to move, either.



Taylor paid much, much more attention to the thrust on her hands after that revelation.



“I thought you were Taylor.” He did have a good point.



“Yeah, what the heck? You went from denying it to talking like it's fact!” Cameron chimed in.



Vale and Sam were suspiciously silent. The former just kept massaging her console. The latter was clearly still trying not to gag.



“I was confused and scared,” Taylor told them, beginning to explain. Her face in the locker’s metal was completely unrecognizable now, and so she turned her attention to widening the hole she made with her hull when she accidentally thrust backwards. “I was still finishing up my merge with the Odyssey. Now, I'm whole.”



“Y-Your merge with the-the Odyssey,” Sam finally spoke, hesitantly, brokenly, but her deadpan tone was still obvious. She appeared to be at the end of her rope.



“Yeah. I'm Taylor Hebert, human, but also now the U.S.A.F. X-304 Daedalus Class DSC Odyssey,” she continued to explain. Yet again, both names rang true in what she guessed was her soul. The deepest, most intimate part of her. Something beyond flesh. Beyond hull.



Huh. Was she starting on the path to Ascension? Something to pay attention to.



“I continue to reiterate this is impossible,” Sam protested, crossing her arms and glaring at the sensor screen which persistently told her very differently.



Before any of them could break out into bickering again, Taylor continued. “At least now I know you're not just voices, you're actually my crew. And I have bad news to tell you, unfortunately.” The new ship girl drew in a deep breath and let it out in an attempt to steel (hah!) herself. “We're not in your original universe anymore.”



Daniel sighed, closed his eyes, and rubbed his nose. “Damn it.”



“What do you mean… Taylor?” Sam asked, suddenly laser focused.



Because of course miss science geek would be interested in this situation beyond the fact they weren't in the Odyssey's home universe. Taylor rolled her eyes and chuckled at the legendary woman's just as legendary scientific interest.



“Simply put, I, Taylor Hebert, am native to a universe that isn't the same as the one you four and the Odyssey, which is now also me, come from,” Taylor began explaining with more depth. The hole in the wall behind the locker was now almost big enough to drive a small car through. Any evidence of her body shape was gone. She took a moment to step out of the Locker, fire the Asgard Beams on very, very low power in order to vaporize the toxic waste, and nod at her success.



Specifically, the success that was firing anti-capital-ship plasma weapons at a small enough diameter and low powered enough to only vaporize the toxic waste, instead of, say, ten miles of bedrock. On her first try, no less!



Man. Her new power set really wasn't remotely what some on PHO dubbed most of the powers in her city. Street level? If she went too fast in atmosphere she could set it on fire!



Taylor shuddered at that thought and immediately promised herself she'd never, ever do so.



There was just one more step to cover her tracks. If it was only her locker which was destroyed the effect would be just the same as walking straight up to the villains, heroes, and ‘adoring’ public, and announcing her identity to the world.



Taylor wasn't sure if she wanted to take that step yet. And she was dreading the future conflicts of interest given she was a U.S.A.F. vessel. The military of Bet’s U.S. might not notice though. Hopefully.



It's not as if her designation was plastered across the side of her hull for all to see or anything.



Oh, right, yeah, that was false. Someone was going to notice. Taylor was thus going to have to decide just where her loyalties lay, and with whom, or if anywhere or anyone even qualified.



She began ripping the doors off random lockers around the hallway. “I've run scans of my Taylor Hebert body's quantum signature, my ship hull’s signature, and the signatures of all of you,” she continued. “They're identical. And they're pretty different from the records I have of the quantum signatures we used to have.”



Sam and Daniel groaned and cursed, respectively.



Vala and Can were clueless. “What?” he asked.



“We are in a different universe than yours,” Taylor dumbed down for them. She stepped back to admire her finished handiwork (or was that thrusterwork, now?) that was the almost completely decimated hallway.



“Alternate reality,” Cam joked, miming checking something off a list on an invisible clipboard, “check. Just gotta get snaked, transformed, aged, die and come back, and get mistaken for an evil deity to finish my SG1 bingo!”



“Hey!” the rest of SG1 denied. In concert.



Taylor chuckled at his joke. It was funny just because of how accurate it was. If you had access to SG1’s uncensored files like she did, you'd find it funny too. All of those happened to them with alarming frequency.



She tuned out her crew's discussion once more to conduct a more in depth scan of what she'd done. The school’s hall was decimated. Locker doors were all over the floor in various stages of violent disassembly. A couple of the rows barely even existed.



And the only fingerprints to be found looked like her hull. Segmented metal. Taylor would feel robbed of a part of her identity given her new fingerprints, but close examination of her fingertips revealed she still had her human print patterns. So she could… switch them, apparently?



She'd love to see the PRT figure out that.



Taylor brushed her hands against each other and placed them on her hips. She congratulated herself on a job well done, nodding at the chaos.



Then she turned around and strode right out of the school into the chilly night. Or… supposedly chilly. That's what her sensors said. It didn't feel cold to her. She wasn't sure if that was her shields protecting her or arm aspect of her new existence, but she didn't really care. It was nice.



Even without a temperature change, passing through her locker and the missing brick wall behind it felt like the beginning of a new journey for her.



Taylor Hebert was reborn as the U.S.A.F. Odyssey, and the world would never be the same.

 

Shipping It Stargate Style
Chapter 3
Go for Launch​

Taylor gazed up at the night sky. It was a deep blue, almost black. The view was immensely pretty. Her new eyes, her sensors, were just so incredibly... powerful. Every shade of every color was visible to her.

And some that weren't colors.

She... could see the entire electromagnetic spectrum! The additions to her sight turned the normally dim night sky into a kaleidoscopic vista of beauty and elegance.

Such an amazing view. Way better than her old eyes.

The ones that needed glasses.

Taylor raised a hand to her face and pressed against the bridge of her nose as if she was adjusting a pair of the vision correcting optics.

But she wasn't.

Taylor didn't need them anymore.

A small perk of her merge with the Odyssey that she just couldn't get over. Compared to everything else it didn't even rate mentioning… yet she couldn't stop marvelling at that simple little difference.

The lack of glasses, of the need for them, was like a shock of cold water to her system. It hammered home just how unlike her previous human existence she now was.

Another deceptively simple difference was her visual range. Now Taylor could see every star in the sky. Every nebula. Hell, every photon coming in from the far off celestial bodies. It almost felt as if she could reach out… and grab them.

She suddenly realized she had reached towards the heavens with a hand and attempted to cup what she knew to be Alpha Centauri. The part of her that was the Odyssey was anxious to return to her home environment.

“Heh,” she snickered, shaking her head. “Soon. Atmosphere first, then a galactic tour. Baby steps Taylor. Baby steps.” She consoled herself with the fact that, eventually, after she had gotten a handle on her new life, she would allow herself a vacation. Amongst the black.

But that was in the future. Taylor had a set of powers that desperately needed calibration for her new body’s configuration. She had been winging it till now, but a single moment of lapsed attention was all it would take for her to accidentally flare her sublight engines too hard and cut a building, much less an enemy cape, in half.

If they survived at all.

Her actual weapons were so hilariously lethal at her new scale it was almost worthless to think of them. They were designed to destroy starcraft, not wipe the floor with any and all of the comparatively very, very squishy capes. Which they would most certainly do.

Taylor from before would have said that the Endbringers or Scion would give her pause. She even believed, for a moment, that she could hear the downtrodden commentary of her former self.

She wasn't sure she would agree with that now.

Even if her weapons proved to be ineffective upon them, which given the damage the Endbringers kept suffering at the hands of powers that were barely firecrackers compared was unlikely, there were a lot of black holes in the Milky Way alone. And she had a Hyperdrive.

Taylor really wasn't interested in killing people on accident. On purpose, though? …Well, there were some people that had to be removed to produce a better future. She was ready to take their lives if she had to, certainly.

But nobody else.

Unless they were the Endbringers. Those monsters deserved everything and anything she could deliver. If they were even people at all...

That was a definite change from her pathos as Taylor. She was ready to do what had to be done. Take down those that deserved it, eliminate acceptable targets. Defend the innocent and brutally put down any oppressors she might come across.

It was the mindset of a soldier.

Fitting, really, for she was now a military vessel. It felt… right.

Just like the rest of her.

Unlike her previous worries she knew it wasn't a case of her becoming Mastered. Her new existence was the blended result of essentially two people. Taylor, and the Odyssey.

Of course her mindset would change. Hell, it had already changed. She didn't curse this much before even in her own head, and she wasn't really as calculating, or hyper-observant, as now. Taylor felt she was ready for battle at any time, any place, and assured she could win handily.

It was something beyond confidence. She was entirely certain of herself and her capabilities. They were both hard fact.

Taylor, who hadn't been confident in years, reveled in the feeling.

Still, she needed to take those capabilities for a full test drive. She had the perfect place to run herself through her paces, too. There really was only one close by area available with the lack of possible collateral damage she required. She needed to develop safeguards for the techniques of… starship girl, name tentative, combat.

Even as much as it pained her ship half, Taylor would have to use the Boat Graveyard to conduct her examinations.

It's not like those old boats were doing anything else anyways. They were probably insane from boredom, pain, and sorrow. If they were alive like she was then she would be putting them out of their misery. If not, it wouldn't matter.

No ship wanted to feel unwanted. That, Taylor was certain of. Odyssey might not have formed a mind, but her soul was there, and so were her instincts.

Now they were Taylor's instincts. And she would feel hopeless if she wasn't wanted.

The less said about how she had been bullied, and its effects on her self worth as Taylor, the better.

“Taylor?” Vala spoke into her intercom.

Taylor most certainly did not jump. She was a professional.

“Sorry,” the ex thief managed to get out over her chuckling and the klanging red alert system Taylor had activated on instinct.

Over in her aft hangar Sam and Cam were startled out of their review of her suspiciously full complement of F-302 Aerospace Superiority Fighters. “Oddy-” Sam began, before she realized what she was saying. “Taylor, turn that off!”

Taylor left it on a few more seconds just to needle the scientist.

“I was thinking. Vala startled me. Sorry Sam, Cam,” she apologized over the intercom in her hangar.

Sam waved her off and dug her nose back into the diagnostics. “This doesn't make any sense…” she mumbled.

Yeah, because becoming a ship from another universe totally did.

Taylor shook her head and chuckled.

“No worries Taylor, we're all still getting used to this,” Cam reassured her.

Taylor found herself smiling. Hey, an attractive guy was trying to make her feel better. It was nice. So what if that guy was a little smaller than normal and inside her…

The brand new starship girl blushed at the route her thoughts had taken. She shook her head to clear it of anything remotely lewd. “Thanks, Cam.”

“No problem. We're a team. Just… with the ship on it too.”

He was taking everything remarkably well, Taylor noted. She turned her attention to finding Daniel to apologize to him too… but she found he literally hadn't noticed. He was back in the Asgard Presentation Room and his head might as well have been underwater for all she could to to reach him.

Taylor couldn't help herself. She snorted with amusement at, as Jack O'Neill frequently called him within her hull, her Spacemonkey's antics.

“Yes, Vala?” she finally asked the original cause of this whole series of mishaps.

Vala but her lip and shifted her eyes around for a few moments. Finally she sighed. “What does it… feel like?” she asked hesitantly.

Taylor blinked. “What does what feel like?” she asked in return.

“Being a ship.”

Oh. “...Oh.”

She had to think about that for a little bit. What did being her… feel like?

Freeing. Amazing. Incredible! Confidence she lacked in her human life was now hers, she was possibly one of the most powerful people on her planet, and she… she just felt right, in a way she hadn't ever felt before.

“I dunno, Vala, it's…” she began, tailing off. “It's hard to describe.”

Vala smiled in a knowing way, patting Taylor's hull plate next to the intercom she was using. “That’s okay. I get it.” She tried, but the disappointment was evident in her voice.

“No, no! I'm.. just trying to find a way to express it,” Taylor insisted, cutting off Vala's incoming and infamous pout. “It's… like nothing I've ever felt before. Heh, obviously, but still. I feel… free, and right, and just so many other things at the same time. I'm confident now. I feel powerful. The thrum of my engines and my reactors flows throughout my body at the same time as I feel my pulse. My shields tickle as they touch and filter the atmosphere. My engines slightly flare every time I take a step. I see beyond anything I ever have, even as I can see the normal world, too. It's… liberating, compared to being human.”

Vala nodded, her face brightening up. “It sounds incredible,” she said.

“It is.”

Vala nodded again and deftly caressed Taylor's hull for a moment. “Thanks for telling me, Taylor,” the ex thief said. “I don't know how long it might take for the others to fully understand this new situation, what with you being our ship and all, but I'm here if you ever need someone to talk to.”

That brought warmth flooding through Taylor. She shivered a bit despite it not being cold. Those words… they resonated somewhere deep within her very being.

Our ship.

“T-Thanks, Vala,” Taylor replied, trying to keep the stuttering out of her voice.

“You're welcome.” A final tender pat on her hull and Vala was off down the hallway, presumably to the mess hall to grab something to eat.

Taylor hastily and almost automatically checked her food stores. After over half a century her admittedly quite expansive cargo bays dedicated to food storage were likely almost empty despite how much they normally held.

Wait… what?

They were… full?

That was odd. Taylor distinctly remembered them running out soon, back when she was The Odyssey only.

...On further thought, Taylor hadn't felt hungry at all since she escaped the Locker. She was in there all day, and after 60 years the Odyssey should also be really low on fuel… which apparently equated each other in her new existence, somehow...

So why wasn't she hungry?

A quick check of her Naquadriah storage found it to be completely, totally full, too.

Okay, this was starting to get weird.

Any weirder than turning into a starship? No, but still weird.

On a hunch, Taylor started checking everything.

Her Naquadriah generators were nearly full. It seemed like they had only used enough fuel to match the time since she became a ship.

Her ammo magazines for all types of weaponry were full. From the complete stock of every mark of nuclear missile, to the naquadah fuel in the limited Goa'uld weapons she had on board, all the way down to the last gun's internal magazine in her armory, it was all completely full.

And… so was her ZPM.

What.

Hold up, since when did she have a ZPM on board? The Asgard Neutrino Ion Generators had been used to power the temporal bubble in her home universe. She knew she wasn't deployed to Orilla with one of that humanity's very tiny supply of very drained Ancient power sources on board, much less a completely full one!

What the fuck!

“Sam,” she spoke up in her hangar, “I've discovered something… possibly alarming, but mostly just very very weird.”

Sam jolted up from her code inspection. “Yes Taylor? What's wrong?”

“I have a full, literally full, ZPM plugged in.”

Sam stared at the ceiling of her hangar for way longer than she should have.

“Excuse me?” Cam said.

“Come again?” Sam asked, at the same time.

Both sounded completely disbelieving.

“Yeah, I don't believe it either. But that is what my systems tell me,” Taylor insisted.

“Maybe something went wrong in whatever the process that turned you into… you, was,” Sam reasoned.

“I can see inside myself with my sensors, Sam, but I would appreciate you two taking a look,” Taylor said. She managed to keep herself from allowing the sudden trembling that had taken over her body from affecting her voice.

Sam pulled her tablet's leads out of the computer core of the Drone 302. “We're on our way.”

---

“You've been quiet for too long,” Taylor stated. She was worried.

Cam and Sam had entered the auxiliary power source room off Taylor's Main Engineering, took one look at the glowing yellow crystal in its socket, and proceeded to do nothing more than stare at it with disbelief.

“That's impossible,” Sam finally announced.

“So it's real? “ Taylor asked. “My sensors aren't wrong?”

Can hesitantly, slowly, reached forward. He first poked the ZPM, gently, then tapped it, and finally laid his hand on top. One pat of its head was clearly all he could take, because he pulled his hand back as of it was burnt.

“Oh yeah,” he sarcastically confirmed, “it's real.”

Sam brought a hand to the side of her head and began massaging her temple. Clearly she had a headache from the sheer impossibility. “And it's full?” she asked Taylor.

“That's what my power system reports, yes,” Taylor agreed.

“I thought Earth didn't have a full one of these,” Cam brought up.

“We don't… didn't,” Sam confirmed. “And even if we somehow did, it wouldn't be on the Odyssey.”

“It's not just the ZPM, Sam,” Taylor revealed, grimacing.

Sam blinked, looked up at the ceiling, and frowned. “What do you mean, Taylor?”

“I'm full. Completely.”

Sam furrowed her eyebrows. “Wha-?”

“Naquadriah, my reactors, food stores, missiles, railgun ordnance, a full complement of Mark I all the way through Mark IX Naquadah and Naquadriah enhanced fission devices, quite a few Horizon platforms, and at least eight of something my sensors yelled at me as stupidly classified that look suspiciously like your prototype Mark X warheads,” Taylor listed off. “Hell, even my food stores, the liquid naquadah in the staff weapons, and the fucking last bullet of the last damned gun in my armories are full!”

Sam just stood there, staring at nothing in wide eyed disbelief.

“Okay,” Cam commented, “even I know that's impossible.”

“I don't think my sensors are at fault Cam,” Taylor refuted. “There's this… you two are gonna think I'm crazy.”

Seeing as Sam was still attempting to process Taylor's dump of ludicrous information, Can fielded the conversation. “Any crazier than turning into a ship from a human?”

Taylor sighed, shaking her head. “Maybe.”

“Like Sam said earlier, all of us are learning about our new situation. The more we know the better we can figure out what to do,” Cam calmly explained.

Taylor breathed in deep. She exhaled, then nodded her head decisively. “Okay. This is gonna sound insane, but… I feel full, Cam, Sam.”

Cam's eyebrows rose. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Just what I said. I feel full,” Taylor repeated. “I'm not hungry. At all.”

Cam blinked. “...And?”

Taylor huffed with irritation. “Cam, I was locked in my locker without food, throwing up, for hours. I should be feeling some kind of hunger.”

Cam's eyebrows rose even higher as he realized what she meant. “Oh. But you don't.”

“But I don't. And it seems like I'm completely full in almost literally every way a ship can be. Fuel, weapons, stocks, auxiliary addons. I even have an extra flight of 302s in my secondary bays.”

Realization struck Cam then. “You think the two are related somehow?”

Taylor nodded. “It fits. Somehow. Feels accurate to my ship instincts too.”

Cam looked back down from the ceiling, then at Sam, and back to the ceiling. “Ship instincts, huh? Maybe. That's something we’ll have to test.” He moved a hand in front of Sam's face and waved.

The resident astrophysicist snapped out of her unfocused state so fast that if Taylor wasn't a ship she'd have gotten whiplash. “Don't do that!” Sam exclaimed, smacking Cam's hand away.

Immediately afterwards she groaned and held her head. “My head's killing me,” she groaned.

Cam frowned while Taylor instantly became worried. He didn't even have to open his mouth.

“The medbay is also completely stocked. Go.”

Cam nodded and put an arm around Sam to support her. “Come on Sam. Let's get you checked out.”

And while the two of them trundled down Taylor's hallways… all she could do was worry.

---

Thankfully the scans showed nothing wrong with Sam. The stress of so much illogical, worldview defying bullshit finally just made her brain decide it had enough.

Taylor understood the feeling. If she didn't have the confidence and surety of self from her Odyssey half, she'd lose it too.

“Sorry for the pain, Sam,” Taylor apologized.

Sam waved her off with the hand that wasn't holding the ice pack to her head. “Don't worry about it. None of this is your fault.”

Taylor smiled at that. “Thanks.”

“Not that I'm against discovering a lot more highly interesting things while we sit in the same spot all night,” Vala interrupted over the intercom, “but maybe standing outside the sight of such wanton destruction until some kind of authorities arrive to arrest is for it isn't the brightest of ideas?”

Sam and Cam looked at each other. Cam shrugged and Sam winced.

“She has a point,” Sam admitted.

Cam sighed. “I know. Taylor, we should get out of here.”
Taylor felt like she could be happy no matter where she was or what she was doing as long as she had her crew to talk to, but relented nonetheless. She still had those tests to get to. “You're right,” she grudgingly agreed. “As much as I don't like the idea of it, you're right, and so is Vala. Moreover I need to figure out how to fight in this new form.”

Cam raised his eyebrows. “Why? Last time I checked, this is Earth. Maybe not our Earth, but a starship is overkill for any domestic problems.”

Taylor scoffed. “Be that as it may, I cannot end up killing those I fight because of it. I need new safeguards. The ones from my ship form ate worthless at my new size.”

“Who could you possibly be fighting?”

“Enemy capes.”

That time it wasn't just Cam who asked. “What?” Sam asked along with him. “Capes? Like, superheroes?”

“And villains,” Taylor confirmed.

Sam looked at Can with disbelief. He mirrored her look. After a couple of seconds, Cam cracked a grin and looked at the ceiling once more. “Nice one, Taylor. You got us. I have to admit, first time I've been pranked by a starship, but you got us.”

Taylor remained silent as she walked around, looking for a good spot to lift off from.

Her lack of a response said everything.

Cam's grin evaporated from his face. Sam groaned with defeat, sagged to the medical bed, and just put her hands over her eyes.

“You've got to be kidding,” Cam exclaimed. Almost pleading.

“Nope,” Taylor denied. She looked at the sky and plotted the cloud cover so she could enter into it when she got high enough.

“Your Earth has SUPERHEROES?!”

“And supervillains. And Endbringers,” Taylor continued to inform them.

Sam's only response was a muted scream of despair.

Can didn't say anything. He just stared at her hull.

Taylor grinned. Her first successful prank on her crew had worked. And age was in the perfect spot to take off with minimal to no evidence of something like a starship having been there in the first place.

The human starship concentrated on engaging her sublight engines just enough to lift off the ground. They happily complied, ticking up to only two thousandths of a percent engaged.

Taylor's sneakers left the ground. She began to rise into the air above her school, head raised high and chin out. The low, rhythmic thrum of her engines rang out into the night in a comforting drone. On a whim she stuck both her arms forward, fists clenched, and soared into the night sky.

Any whoops of glee she would deny vehemently.

She was the Odyssey. Nobody could ever take that from her. She dared the entire universe to go right ahead and try.

Not even the Endbringers would be capable of it.

---

Brockton Bay was pretty at night, from the sky. All the dim lights from the homes of less well off residents to the lofty high rises and businesses closer to the Boardwalk lit up Taylor's sensors like the Fourth of July.

They formed a pattern almost like that of an organism. Thousands of little beacons of hope, collectively warding beck the darkness.

A muffled boom rippled out through the air around her. Taylor instantly took her attention off the great view and investigated the cause.

Oh.

That was the sound barrier.

She reduced her speed with a sheepish chuckle.

“Sam, mind making an expected thrust calculations change? I just accidentally’d the sound barrier before I managed to throttle up more than another thousandth. I can't really do that next to other capes, most won't be able to survive.”

Another wordless, strangled scream echoed from her medbay.

 

Shipping It Stargate Style
Chapter 4
The High Ground​

The Boat Graveyard.

Taylor hovered in the sky above the desolate landscape of rusted out ships, still leaking oil, and what little clear water remained.

“What the hell happened here?” Cam asked.

Taylor sighed. “You want the short version or the miserable one?”

The nominal leader of SG1 blinked. “Uh, short. Please.”

Taylor nodded and turned her eyes onto the huge container ship blocking the bay. “You see that?” she asked, pointing it out with her hand.

“The giant eyesore blocking the bay?” Cam asked rhetorically.

Taylor nodded, lowering her finger. “A few years back, after Leviathan showed up, travelling on the sea became kinda… dangerous. Way too dangerous for most shipping companies,” she began to explain.

“...Globally?” Sam spoke up from her medical bed.

“Yep.”

“You're telling me your world doesn't have international shipping?!” Sam almost yelled, her voice displaying how concerned she was about that.

“We have planes, and some Capes help out, but for the most part?” Taylor answered, scoffing. “Pretty much.”

Sam just stared up at Taylor's medbay's ceiling, jaw dropped.

"What?"

"How- what-" she spluttered, speechless.

"What's wrong, Sam?" Cam asked, moving closer to her bed.

Sam waved him away, but her eyes were still wide. "How the hell do you have anything approaching a civilization if one of your backbones is missing?!"

Taylor was quiet for a few moments. She whirled that over in her head for a while, actually wondering. For pretty much the first time in her life, she took a good, long look at her world, at how things were progressing and what the global situation was. Things she’d brushed off or accepted as normal her whole life were returned to, using the Odyssey as a backstop to prevent dismissal, and she saw.

Her massive calculation potential, which apparently translated into a ridiculously high intelligence, was put towards the query.

Taylor's eyes widened when she realized it. Figured out what was wrong. Or… how very little wasn’t.

Sam had a point. No, she had the point. Taylor on her own never could've seen it, but Odyssey had the records and sensor readings of her original Earth.

And the comparison didn't look good.

"A decade," Taylor abruptly stated.

Sam and Cam looked at each other, then back to her ceiling. "Huh?" Cam asked.

"My… our new, world, it has a decade."

Cam swallowed heavily. Sam looked grim, her mouth pressed into a line.

"I just ran a comparison between your, and my Odyssey side's, Earth, and Earth Bet. My Taylor Earth. This one." She waved around her to indicate her world, though it was a subconscious action. None of the people inside her except Vala due to her position on Taylor's Bridge could actually see her doing so. "Populations are dropping. Countries that exist on Odyssey's Earth don't exist on Taylor's. The Endbringers' attack pattern is a massive coordinated cascade failure waiting to happen. Africa is literally on fire because of Ash Beast, Siberia and Russia are who knows how compromised by The Sleeper, The United States might as well have surrendered sovereignty and military might to the PRT, London is defunct, Switzerland is quarantined… and there's more. So much more."

Cam's face started out worried and was now pale, barely any blood present. The man was a soldier, not an idiot. He wasn't as smart as Jack but it was close. "That's bad."

Sam grit her teeth and rubbed her forehead, looking defeated. "It's way more than bad, Cam, her world is about to collapse," she corrected, then caught her breath with an even more worried look. "Uhm… Taylor, how are you taking this?"

Taylor closed her eyes and clenched her fists. "The Taylor side of me isn't handling it very well, but I have Odyssey to manage myself. I'll be fine. Especially once we start fixing my planet."

The medbay was silent for a few seconds as all of them gathered themselves.

Cam was the first one to speak. "I'm in," he declared.

Sam raised her head a little and looked at him weirdly. "In what?" she asked.

"I'm in, Sam," he repeated himself, then looked at the ceiling. "Taylor. Let's fix your world."

Taylor felt her breath catch. He was willing to help her Earth? Just like that?

Sam dropped her hand, looking dumbfounded. "Cam, it's not that simple-" she began.

Cam shook his head vehemently. "Yes it is," he refuted. "We're SG-1. This is what we do. We see injustice, we fix it. You destroyed a galaxy spanning ancient empire of body stealing snakes before I even graduated, Sam. We destroyed the Ori, and they were the closest things to actual gods we've ever encountered. We can fix one planet."

Sam looked shocked at his little speech. Her eyebrows were raised as high as they could go. "We don't know the Ori are gone, Cam-" she attempted to protest.

Taylor startled at something. There was- something was wrong, there was a feeling in her chest that shouldn't have been there, it didn't belong, she didn't even know what it was-

"Even if we messed that up, it’s not our problem right now," Cam shut Sam down, for once acting the nominal team commander in a very real way. "We're in this reality now. Last time I checked we can't get back yet. If we could just go back I'm sure Odyssey would've brought it up." He paused, then looked up at her ceiling again. "Right?"

Taylor felt herself choking up with what she thought was worry. "Y-Yeah," she managed. "I wouldn't rule out Sam and I rigging up a reality drive of some kind if we spend time trying but I don't have anything on board that helps for that right now."

Cam held his hand out to the ceiling and dropped it. "There, see?" he presented to Sam. "We're stuck for now. We might as well do what we do and make it a better place while we're here. Maybe take down some bad guys at the same time."

Sam still looked conflicted, but the small smile on her lips showed she was getting talked into it. "It'll be tough, Cam," she noted. "We're cut off from backup, from supplies, from command…"

Cam shook his head and moved to put his hand on Taylor's hull. "We've got our backup and supplies right here," he negated. "The Odyssey has never let us down, and now she's a person too. The best ship just got better."

Taylor couldn't help herself. She started crying. Tears of joy, not worry, leaked out of her eyes and fell down her shirt before dropping out of sight through the air. She brought her hands around herself and hugged her stomach, feeling a warmth she had only felt from her mother before begin to ignite within her chest.

Best ship.

She recognized the feeling now. The two feelings, really, but blended so well that they were hard to discern. And Taylor hadn't felt one in two years… while the other was ripped from her as a young child.

Love and Hope.

Her crew loved her, and they were willing to save her planet just because they were around. Moreover they were SG-1. If anyone could do it, it was them. Even if Teal’c was missing… they could still do anything.

Sam blinked, then tilted her head. "Huh." Her eyes revealed the power of her mind whirling around, her age not remotely slowing her down. "If we can find a way to refuel, I guess Odyssey can work as a mobile base. We didn't really design the Daedalus class to do that, but we've got the Asgard core..."

Cam looked at her like an eager puppy. "So?" he pressed.

Sam sighed, closed her eyes, nodded, and looked at Cam. "Alright. I guess I'm in too."

Cam fist pumped and jumped a little, grinning wide. "Yes!"

Sam just smiled and rolled her eyes at him.

Taylor found her tears increasing as the warmth in her chest rose higher.

Cam cleared his throat and put his hands behind his back, straightening his shoulders in an attempt to look official.

It just made Sam and Taylor giggle, the latter through her tears. He sent the one of them in the medbay with him a glare.

“Taylor, put me on shipwide,” he directed, an air of command to his voice.

So that was how it was going to be, huh? “Y-Yes, C-captain,” she automatically said, then halted.

Nobody said anything for several long, confused seconds.

“Captain?” Sam asked in lieu of the shell-shocked Cam.

“S-Shut up Sam, it came from my ship side,” Taylor fired back, stuttering even through her spluttering. Thankfully the tone of her voice that would’ve sounded like she was crying instead came across more like embarrassment.

Sam chuckled and shook her head. “Captain Cam, huh?” she asked again, this time teasing Cam.

Not that the target change helped. Taylor felt her tear-stained cheeks turn bright red. She really was embarrassed now.

Cam blinked, shook his head, then shook it again. “We can talk about command ranks later,” he declared, seemingly the only thing he could think to say. He coughed lightly and looked back up at Taylor’s ceiling. “Taylor, shipwide, please?”

“Yes!” Taylor squeaked, thankful that Cam wasn’t teasing her about her slip up too. While Cam had been in command of her before, he wasn’t necessarily her Captain at the moment. Taylor wasn’t even sure whether she really wanted one… at least one who could tell her what to do. The warmth in her chest when she thought of having a Captain had nothing to do with the command ability and focused more on having a person she could rely on to take care of her.

She looked inside herself for her comms system and found a way to relay a given room’s audio input to the entire ship. Once she found it, she flipped it… and then decided to pipe all other rooms back into the medbay just in case Daniel or Vala wanted to respond. “You’re on shipwide, Cam, and Daniel and Vala can reply.”

Cam looked surprised, but nodded. “Thanks for thinking of that.”

Vala and Daniel both jumped, Vala almost falling out of the command chair of Taylor’s bridge. Daniel merely resumed his calm footing. Regardless, both of them looked at the ceiling. “Thanks for thinking of what?” Vala asked, recognizing Cam’s voice.

Daniel sighed and reached up to rub his forehead. Sam rolled her eyes and grinned.

Cam ignored her.

“Alright team, we’ve got a situation,” Cam announced.

Vala sat up straighter, and Daniel became much more serious. “What’s wrong, Cam?” Daniel asked.

“Taylor’s Earth has a decade left before it suffers total societal collapse,” Sam informed them.

Cam nodded. “Yep, that.”

The other two were stunned to silence for several long, processing filled moments.

"Well that's not good," came Daniel's attempt at humor.

Vala bit back at him, sarcasm in her voice. The slightest tremor of uncertainty underlying that sarcasm betrayed how she really felt. "Thank you for that wonderful summary!"

And the discussion commenced.

At the end of it, though, SG1 was all on board. And Taylor wanted so dearly to hug them it hurt.

She pledged to herself, and her crew in silence, that she would find a way to do just that.

---

Eventually the logistics and strategy discussion, with Taylor filling in history, came to a close. They moved on to other topics… which mostly meant more history, as Cam and Sam kept asking endless questions of Taylor about their new world.

“So I guess Amazon never took off here, then,” Cam lamented, attempting a joke to lighten the mood.

Taylor cocked her head to the side. “What's Amazon? Like, the rainforest?”

Her question stirred a query to her own databanks. She received a torrent of mostly useless information on what Amazon was.

And it stunned her.

“Holy shit, a worldwide, two day capable, shipping and online shopping system?!” Taylor almost yelled over her internal comms system. "Is that real?!"

Cam grinned. “You just look it up in the ship's… your, database?” he knowingly asked.

Taylor nodded to herself. “Yeah. Your… our old world was pretty nuts, huh?” she mused, even as she recognized that she was holding herself above something that had plagued her human life with frankly ludicrous levels of gravitational thrust from parts of her ship life. And yeah, she'd included that system in her original comparison of Odyssey's Earth and Earth Bet, but it wasn't really conscious.

The concept was mind boggling to her Taylor side. That's what Earth was supposed to be like? What else was there in her databanks that would paint her world in an even worse light?

“Nuts.” Cam couldn’t help it, he chuckled. “That’s a way to say it, sure.”

“Completely crazy on a median day is better,” Sam groaned.

Completely crazy. Right.

Like flying, or massing… a value that even in tons Taylor would never admit to, even in her own head (oh gods the fat jokes)... or having thrusters the radius of several school buses stacked end to end on top of each other.

Even when she started thinking about her new situation that way, considering the superpowers and capes and Endbringers of Bet, her human world was still winning awards for nuttyness over her ship one.

Because, seriously? Superheroes? Odyssey had witnessed a lot, but never quite that level of complete and utter bullshit… while Taylor lived it every day.

“Are we going to land, darling, or are you just going to hover all day?” Vala’s entirely unhelpful prodding registered on her comms systems from her bridge.

Taylor shook herself out of her small funk and acknowledged that she should probably do as Vala suggested. “Yeah, we need to get these tests going. Though I’m happy that the inadvertent duration test of my atmospheric VTOL gravity engines has resulted in a favorable outcome.”

“Favorable,” Cam dryly parroted, “right.”

Sam giggled, a true giggle. She didn’t often do that, which made it that much more precious to Taylor. Especially so given their previous and rather sombre discussion.

Storing the recording in her frankly ridiculous storage space took no time at all, nor did the several times she rewatched it.

Just to check the file integrity, she swore to herself.

Daniel snickered in her Asgard Database room, but somehow sensed when she paid more attention to him and rapidly straightened his face to try and appear like the wizened old professor he liked acting as in his old age.

Vala collapsed back into her Captain’s chair, blowing air out of her mouth. “Thank you! Standing up here is killing me!”

You didn’t have to stand up the whole time, I’m the one hovering, Taylor thought, though she managed to keep it from her comms system. She was getting better at isolating her new senses and abilities, that was for sure.

Yes, they and her old world was nuts, but SG-1 was her crew. Odyssey wouldn't have it any other way.

Her new world was a shithole, but it could be fixed. That very crew was on board with not that much hesitation in the pledge. What little there was only applied to the difficulty of the task, not whether it could or should be done. Those were givens.

Taylor hadn't felt anything like that in her life. Her world likely didn't have the concept of such selfless attitudes. She found herself liking it, especially as she herself felt like it was an obvious answer to a stupid question from her Odyssey side.

Odyssey already loved them. And due to their selfless and vehement pledge, Taylor wasn’t far behind.

Earth Bet didn't deserve SG-1. But that was okay. They saved people anyways. Because that's what their real job had become, what they had ended up gravitating into regardless of their official missions.

The Tau'ri saved the galaxy. And now, they were going to save Taylor's world.

Come hell or high water, storm or rain, egomaniacal overlord aliens, space monsters, turmoil or strife, and even if the gods themselves objected; the Tau'ri, and their ship, would fix it all.

With that conviction roaring in her heart, Taylor knew what she was going to do.

She would test her powers, do some calibration… tell her Dad, no matter how much her Taylor side disagreed, and then…

"Let's go save the world, SG-1," she declared.

Their cheers felt like the best thing ever.

---

Taylor dropped through the air like a slightly heavy feather. She was carefully watching her gravity thrust system to make sure she didn’t accelerate any faster than she wanted to. Given how much she now weighed… a high speed impact would be rather disastrous for at least the nearby beach, if not the ship graveyard as a whole.

Though it didn’t seem to be correct even then. She was able to roughly figure out how much she seemed to weigh based on the gravity she was having to negate via counterthrust. A pass over herself with her sensors showed that the calculations were pretty close to accurate, so she didn’t doubt the math she’d come up with on the fly.

Taylor snorted and grinned to herself. Heh, on the fly. Because I figured it out while flying. Taylor, why?

Anyways, she was roughly having to counteract around 250 pounds, give or take.

Taylor had always been tall. But she was also very skinny, as… Emma had taken so many chances to underscore for her during her time at Winslow.

No way did she weigh that much. Half that, maybe. So there was clearly some kind of aspect of her true mass as Odyssey bleeding over to her human form. The fact her ‘new’ weight matched what her records showed of her weight in orbit of Earth in number, if not magnitude, lent credence to the assumption.

Just…, Taylor winced to herself. Just short by several decimal places. Two and a half trillion- nope, so not thinking about it. Really, Odyssey?! And I thought the fat jokes were bad before!

She wasn’t sure which weight would impact the beach if she just dropped. Her new apparently more human weight… or her true weight.

Thus the worries of the beach literally exploding. And the very careful touchdown procedure.

No matter how careful she was, though, her minimum thrust speed kicked in again. She slammed into the sand, both her shoes sinking deep enough to leave foot holes.

"One small step for a ship…" Taylor found herself almost automatically quoting as she looked down to her knees meeting the beach.

She cut off her thrusters and experimentally yanked her leg up. It took a bit more oomph than she needed to walk normally, and thus the ship in girl form accidentally overrode her thrust limiters for a moment.

The sand between her legs and the flat beach ceased to exist. A short burst of plasma fired off away from her on a forward and slightly up vector. A sound like a shotgun rung around all the massive wrecks of the Graveyard, petering out and turning slightly high pitched as it traveled away from her.

She was left standing in a small crater with the sand blasted back, glass around her shoes, and a small trail of more glass and scorched sand leading away from her.

"...One giant kick for us," Cam managed to add. All of SG-1 had been watching her sensors, Daniel changing focus back and forth between his database reading and the screen she projected for him.

"Sam, would you mind adding a confirmation window to my thrust limiters, please?" Taylor deadpanned.

"Yeah…" Sam gulped, gazing out at the casual devastation, "I should probably do that."

"Thanks."