The small amount of light emitted by the object standing in the corner of the warehouse distrubed no one save a lone rat that scurried quickly away when a man appeared standing before the object. The man turned a circle before he pulled out a small flashlight and studied his dusty surroundings.

"Well, this isn't a good sign." He made his way through the abandoned warehouse, stopping here and there to take note of the objects stored there. He found an office in one corner of the warehouse and rummaged through the desk. "Ah ha, what do we have here?" he exclaimed and pulled a folder from a drawer. "NID, again not a good sign." He looked around and sighed. "Though I think it's safe to say they forgot about this warehouse. Probably good for me. Let's see if the SGO exists here." He spread the contents of the folder over the dust-littered surface of the desk. It took him nearly an hour to find mention of the Stargate and he was pleased to discover it was stored in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. "Perfect, let's hope this place isn't far from there."

He exited the warehouse and followed a long winding dirt road to a paved one. "Great, middle of nowhere, that helps." He began walking and after several hours managed to flag down a vehicle. "I need to get to Colorado Springs," he told the driver.

"Not a problem, son, take us about forty minutes to get there," the man told him. "Hop in. You break down out here?"

"Something like that."

The man chuckled. "Your woman get mad and dump you here?"

He grinned. "Had that happen to you?"

"On more than one occasion. Name's Frank Wells."

"Oliver Kain, nice to meet you." He shook the man's hand.

Sam turned when a soldier stepped into the briefing room. "What is it, Airman?"

"Ma'am, the guards at the gate have a man in custody who was attempting to get on base, he asked to speak to whoever is in charge."

"Since when do they send someone to fetch me for lunatics trying to get on base?"

"Uh, ma'am, he claims that he's Dr. Oliver Kain."

Oliver frowned. "That's impossible, I'm right here."

The Airman cleared his throat. "Yes, Doctor, the guards remembered you arriving this morning."

"Then please explain to me why you're interrupting our briefing," Sam said.

"The thing is, ma'am, he looks like Dr. Kain. The guards thought you might want to speak to him, he seems to know quite a bit about the SGC."

"Bring him here," she ordered.

"Yes, ma'am." The Airman left.

Lee arched a brow at her brother. "Is there something I should know? Are we triplets?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Oliver answered.

"Take it from someone who has met alternate versions of herself, it never gets less weird." Sam grinned at Oliver.

"Alternate versions, great more SGC weirdness," Oliver muttered.

Mal sat forward. "Alternate realities suck and I don't recommend them."

Oliver nodded. "Agreed. Though, we don't seem to have left our reality."

"Then our other Oliver must be here from one," Sam replied.

"Yes, I am."

They all turned to stare at Oliver where he stood between two Airmen at the top of the stairs.

"Come and take a seat, Dr. Kain."

"Thank you, General O'Neill."

"It's Carter here, Dr. Kain."

"Oh, sorry I just assumed you and Jack ..." he trailed off.

She laughed. "Yes, we're married, but I chose to keep my name."

He nodded, his eyes went to Lee. "It's good to see you."

She grinned. "Yeah, except that I've already seen you today." She indicated the other Oliver sitting beside her. "Great, now there's two of you to annoy me. Thing 1 and Thing 2."

He smiled. "Call me Henry so we can avoid confusion."

Mal grinned. "Henry?"

"My middle name," both Oliver's answered in unison.

Lee chuckled. "So, didn't I want to come with you on this little adventure or did you make me stay behind?"

"You're dead," he told her in an emotion-filled voice.

"I'm ... dead? What happened?"

"Let me start at the beginning. I'm here because I'm trying to find a reality where the Lucian Alliance hasn't taken over yet. In my reality, SG-1 was captured by the Alliance."

"Yeah we've been there and done that a couple of times," Van told him.

"Well, my SG-1 escaped, or so we thought."

"So you thought? I don't understand," Mal said.

"The Alliance has a Goa'uld mind control device and they used it on SG-1. By the time we realized it, it was too late. They let the Alliance through the Gate onto Atlantis. We can't use the Gate at the SGO because the Pegasus Gate takes precedence."

"Atlantis is still on Earth?" Oliver asked him.

"Yes, we don't have a ZPM to power it. We moved all Stargate operations over to Atlantis because of the Gate override issue. The Alliance has control of the city and Cheyenne Mountain. Those of us who are left have set up what little defense we could at Research Base Alpha."

Sam frowned. "Dr. McKay didn't work out the work around so you can use the Earth Gate?"

"Who is Dr. McKay?"

"Dr. Rodney McKay," Van answered. "He's our foremost authority on Ancient technology."

"I'm sorry but he isn't a part of our program." He shrugged and leaned forward in his seat. "We weren't able to deprogram SG-1. Whatever the Alliance did was permanent, nothing we did would snap them out of it. It came down to a fight and ..." he trailed away and looked at Lee. "I begged you to listen to me, to remember who I was to you but I failed to get through to you and you refused to put down the gun. I'm sorry."

"You killed me?"

"You shot your sister!" Oliver shouted. "How could you do that?"

"If I had any other choice I would have taken it, trust me. It broke my heart to shoot her," Henry answered. "Look, can you help me or not? This is the sixth reality I've visited through the mirror and the rest have already lost control of the Milky Way to the Alliance. This is the first one where they haven't taken over yet."

"We'll do what we can but we need to know everything," Oliver said.

"Dr. Kain, that isn't up to you," Sam said.

"We have to help him! We can't let the Alliance take over," Oliver wailed.

"Gather all the information you can, once we know the details we can make a decision on whether or not we can assist. All right?" Sam replied.

"Yes, of course."

"Good, figure it out, SG-1. I need to let the President know what's happened." She rose, stopped and turned to Henry with a frown. "You said you came through the mirror?"

"Yes, the Quantum Mirror that the original SG-1 found on P3R-233."

"That's impossible, General Hammond ordered that mirror destroyed."

"Your mirror is in some old dusty NID warehouse in Pueblo, Colorado," he told her.

"The NID, of course. I'll send a team there to retrieve it, we'll need it to get you home. Write down the location if you can remember it or anything that could lead us to it."

He held out a small device. "Don't need to, this will lead you back there. I left the locator beacon so I'd be able to find my way back there."

"Perfect. I'll handle the mirror, SG-1 you handle the information and figure out if we can help or not."

"And if we can?" Lee asked.

"Formulate a plan." She turned away and headed for her office. She stopped in the doorway. "And run the plan past me before you act, SG-1."

"Yes, ma'am," Mal answered.

She disappeared into her office and shut the door.

Lee turned to Henry. "All right, tell us everything."

"Well, I've already explained how the Alliance managed to take control. What else do you want to know?"

"They have control of both Gates?" Van asked him.

"Yes."

"What about the Antarctic Gate, do you still have that stored somewhere?" Oliver asked him.

"Antarctic Gate? There's another Gate on Earth?"

Oliver sat forward. "You never found the Ancient outpost in Antartica?"

"No. Outpost? What sort of outpost?"

Oliver grinned. "It has a chair platform."

"You're kidding?" Henry looked between them. "You aren't kidding."

"No. If we can unbury the Ancient outpost and power it, we can probably use it against them, if they haven't found a way to power the shields," Van told him.

"The shields have minimal power but we've never run them for very long at one time because it takes a lot to keep it up. The Alliance depends on its overwhelming numbers to keep anyone from retaking the city. They also have ships in orbit. If anyone gets close to the city they take them out from space. It isn't pretty, we lost a couple of strike teams in the beginning trying to retake the city."

"If we can get the Antarctic outpost cleared out we can use Dr. McKay's work around to use the Gate. If the people on P1N-035 still have their ZPM we can take it and use it to power the outpost," Lee told them.

"We'd need a dead one to trade it out like we did," Van pointed out.

She shook her head. "No, we dress as Ancients and tell them we're the Teachers and we need the device. They'll hand it over because they revere the Ancients."

"That's actually a good idea," Oliver said.

"So we're going to lie to them. Again," Van said to Lee.

"And it's a damn good thing we took it the first time otherwise Nesrin would have gotten her grubby little mitts on it!" Lee snapped.

"She has a point," Mal told Van.

Van threw his hands in the air. "Fine, the theft was a fabulous idea the first time around so why wouldn't it be this time around?" He slumped in his seat and began humming quietly.

Henry chuckled. "Does yours sing when he's nervous too?"

"He sings when he's nervous, excited or snarky," Oliver answered.

Henry laughed. "I didn't realize how much I missed that."

Lee frowned at him. "So you never joined SG-1?"

He shook his head. "No, I was part of the Atlantis team studying the city. You joined after I did and became a member of SG-1. Three missions in the team was captured and that was the beginning of the end. But I did do some work with the team once."

"Hold up, they brainwashed us that first time they captured us and no one noticed?" Lee scowled at him.

"Like I said, by the time we realized something was wrong it was too late. The Alliance used SG-1 to keep apprised of our movements. They stayed a step ahead of us and they gathered more troops and their power grew. We lost before we knew we were even fighting a war. How have you managed to keep them in check?"

"Well for starters we didn't get brainwashed," Lee told him.

"Then we undermined her most trusted Second," Van said with a grin.

"Are you talking about Xanth?" Henry asked.

"Yup, he was the one who captured us that first time. We discovered that Nesrin bugged our radios and set her and her buddy Xanth up. We went to one of the planets where they were growing Kassa and burned the fields."

"And what he's not saying is, before we started burning things we had a nice discussion about where to start and made it sound like it was all Xanth's idea," Lee added.

"She lost her faith in him and killed him and his entire crew. Once she lost her trust in him, she began to doubt the rest of her Seconds. Last we heard she murdered all of them and is slowly replacing them," Mal explained.

"We also stole a shipment of Naquadah from them. They weren't happy about that," Lee said with a smirk.

"Nesrin leads through fear. Her people fear retribution if they fail her. It's the perfect breeding ground for mistrust." Mal folded his arms on the table. "The woman is teetering on the edge. She walks a fine line between madness and sanity. Someone as ruthless as she is has to walk that line or they can't function effectively as a dictator. You have to be a little insane to rule like that."

"So how do we beat her then?" Henry looked between them. "It's too late for us to undermine her Seconds."

"First we find the outpost and get the ZPM, then we figure out how to get our people into Atlantis without getting them blown up," Mal answered. "If we can get strike teams into the city then we can take it back. Once we take out the ships they have in orbit it's likely they'll put the shield up to avoid any attack so we would need to get our people into the city before we take out their ships."

"I think I know how we can do that," Oliver answered.

"How?" Mal asked.

"I'll have to talk to Dr. McKay but he and Dr. Zelenka were working on a cloaking device for small scale."

"Wait, like a personal cloaking device?" Mal asked him.

"Yeah, it can also be used to cloak a small troop transport. The problem is, the last time I spoke to him they were having difficulty keeping it powered."

"As long as it lasts long enough to get our people into the city that's all we need. Call him and see if he can provide us with a couple. Now, we need a way to dig out the outpost quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. Any ideas?"

Van raised his hand. "I've got one." He stood. "Follow me."

They looked at one another before they jumped up to follow him.

"Van, where are we going?" Lee asked.

"SG-12 brought back a device from their last mission. The miners on the planet use it to quickly dig out tunnels. The team traded medical supplies for it. I think we could use it to dig out the outpost." He stepped into the lab. "Everyone, this is Dr. Koi, he's an engineer and he and his team work on reverse engineering a lot of the tech we bring back. Dr. Koi, SG-1 and uh ..." he hesitated and looked at Henry. "Guest," he finished. "We're interested in the mining device SG-12 brought back."

"It's over here." He led them to a table where parts were scattered.

"It's in pieces, that doesn't help us," Lee said.

"Oh, you're looking for the original device? Hold on." He vanished into an adjoining room and returned with a small handheld device about the size of a cordless drill. "Sorry, I thought you were interested in how the reverse engineering was going."

"We need to borrow this for a little bit for a mission," Mal said and held out his hand.

The Doctor clutched the device closer. "I can't authorize that! What if it gets broken?"

"Then we promise to go trade for another one." Mal wiggled his fingers. "Hand it over."

Dr. Koi frowned at Mall then focused on Van. "Dr. Walsh, you can't expect me to just hand things over because you're team has asked me to!"

"Tracy, come on, we need it. It's important. If it will make you feel better I'll go get General Carter and she can order you to give it to us," Van replied.

"General Carter knows?" Tracy asked.

"Yes, she does. She authorized this mission."

"Then I guess it's okay." He reluctantly handed the device to Mal. "Please be careful with it. It's the only one we have and if we're going to successfully reverse engineer it we need it intact."

"Don't worry, it will be in good hands." Mal turned on his heel and left the room.

Van grinned. "Thanks, we'll bring it back as soon as we're done with it." He followed Mal from the room.

The others thanked the Doctor and followed Mal and Van.

"Dude, is his name really Tracy?" Lee asked.

"Yes, you do know it was a guy's name before it became a girl's name?" Van answered.

She grinned. "Yeah, but it is mostly a girl's name now. Poor guy."

Oliver chuckled. "You do know that Dr. McKay's first name is Meredith, right?"

She burst out laughing. "Really?"

"Yes, really, why do you think he goes by Rodney?"

She continued to giggle as they made their way back to the briefing room.

Mal stopped and placed the device on the table. "I'm going to talk to the General and fill her in on the plan. Oliver, get with Dr. McKay and find out about the cloaking device and have him explain his workaround for the Gates. We're going to need to dial out from the Antartica Gate to go to P1N-035 and get the ZPM. Lee, you and Van need to find outfits that will allow you to pass for Ancients. We'll meet back here in two hours."

Henry raised his hand. "Um, what do I do?"

Mal went to a cabinet on one wall and returned with a notebook. "Figure out the best places for our strike teams to go into the city. You would know better than us where they have guards stationed and what their defenses are. Write it all down so we can come up with a good plan to get us in."

"All right." Henry took a seat and began sketching while the others scattered to complete their tasks.