Page 24 of Fox in Plain Sight

Do it, damn it! Nick wanted to scream, but his tongue felt thick and sluggish.

He stared at his hands, barely able to focus on them now. They looked frozen in place, paralyzed.

His heart began to race. Again and again he tried to move his fingers but failed. Failed not only himself, but his fellow Stargate agents, and his country.

Nick held his breath like he always did. But no matter how often he’d seen this vision play out, he never looked away, always hoping against all hope that this time the outcome would be different. It wasn’t.

The explosion on the screen was of massive proportions. The shockwave reached the water moments later, blasting the boats off their course and into the air, crushing them as if they were made of matchsticks. Bits of sail cloth flew like tiny birds in the churning air.

But by that time the shockwave had reached Nick, too, and he was flung in the air and catapulted toward the wall. For a split second before he hit it, he saw the house he’d been in: a mansion, though it wasn’t his.

“Nooooo!”

His own scream pulled him from the vision. Bathed in sweat, he reared up. There was darkness all around him. He was in bed. Next to him, somebody moved.

“Nick?” It was the panicked voice of a woman.

Breathing hard, he tried to concentrate, tried to remember where he was. It took him three seconds to find his bearings.

“I’m fine,” he said, already dragging his legs out of bed to sit up at the edge. “Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep, Michelle.”

He felt her hand on his back and instinctively jerked away.

“But, you’re—”

“I’m fine.” He jumped up. “I’ll take a shower if you don’t mind, then I’ll go.”

Before Michelle could voice a protest, he left her bedroom and closed the door behind him. Outside in the hallway, he ran a shaky hand through his damp hair and tried to calm his pounding heart.

The vision, unlike all his other premonitions, came only during sleep and was becoming more frequent, as if to show him that the event he was seeing was coming closer. Yet he was no closer to averting it than he’d been three years ago when he’d first had this premonition after the murder of the founder of the top secret Stargate program.

He was running out of time.