Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 (2 page)

To Sally and Tom -you know why!

he rangers' jeep finally accelerated and sped off along a barely
visible track. It chased up a cloud of powdery dirt and exhaust
fumes, and once that had settled at last a dust-covered figure crept
from a hollow beneath the pueblo's northern wall.

"About time," the figure muttered and sneezed.

Ten years or so ago he'd have turned up his nose at the Indiana
Jones antics. Ten years or so ago he'd been an assistant professor
(tenure track) and would have had no problem getting a digging
permit. Those could be surprisingly hard to come by if you weren't
affiliated to some accredited research institution. On the other
hand, how many assistant professors (tenure track or no) got to go
zipping across the galaxy for a living? There was something to be
said for lousy hours and constant peril.

Okay, so the Air Force probably could have sorted out a digging
permit. But that would have meant queries and paperwork, followed
by red tape and questions, followed by inquiries and procedure.
Besides, this wasn't anything to do with the Air Force. This was to
do with his being inquisitive. Not to mention that playing hide-andseek with the National Park rangers actually was fun.

Dr. Daniel Jackson grinned and tried to fluff the dust from his
hair. Pointless, really. Chaco Canyon was the place where dust
had been invented, together with multi-story masonry and rulerstraight highways. The latter being weird, because the Anasazi
hadn't been familiar with the concept of wheels. This and other
inconsistencies had piqued his curiosity, which partly explained
why he was skulking around here. Lousy hours and constant peril
notwithstanding, he still was an archaeologist. He remembered that
well enough.

With the jeep gone, the canyon fell quiet again. The jackdaws
returned, wheeling above parched clay ruins and cawing their
annoyance at having been disturbed. Daniel sympathized. The
rangers' patrol visit had cost him half an hour.

"So what?"

This wasn't a mission. This was Thanksgiving weekend, and
he only had himself to worry about. Jack had gone fishing; Teal'c
had barricaded himself in his quarters as soon as he'd heard that
Jack was going fishing; and Sam was tinkering with something or
other in her lab, which meant that, unless Earth came under attack
from the Goa'uld, she wouldn't resurface anytime soon. Nobody
had suggested communal turkey carving, and in a way Daniel was
grateful.

Truth was, it still felt odd being back in a... corporeal way. It
felt even odder among other people. Partly because other people,
from natural nosiness and sometimes genuine concern, tended to
ask where he'd been for fifteen months. Even if Daniel could have
resolved that question to his own or anybody else's satisfaction,
he wouldn't have been allowed to divulge the answer. And the
reasonably vague but truthful I ascended to a higher plane of
existence generally proved a mood killer, except among Buddhist
monks. In short, smalltalk got a bit awkward these days.

A breeze sprang up and chased a couple of dust devils across
the plateau, swirling pink and orange in the low sun. Time to do
some shoveling. Daniel hopped back into the kiva - a vault where
religious ceremonies had been held. A shaft of muted daylight
dropped through the ceiling after him, picking out a sleeping bag, a
backpack, some cooking gear, and a laptop huddling in a comer.

Yesterday he'd discovered a corridor down here, buried under
rubble and undisturbed. If anything lay beneath, he'd see it
within the next couple of hours, thanks to somewhat abbreviated
excavation methods his former instructors wouldn't have approved
of. But the proper shoring up of tunnels and scrupulous sifting of
dirt for bone fragments and shards of pottery fell by the wayside
if you didn't have a digging permit and hordes of eager student
helpers.

In the back wall yawned the hole he'd dug so far. It stretched
downwards through hopefully solid debris. If it wasn't solid, he'd
find out soon enough. Daniel grabbed a trowel, eased himself
in, and cautiously began to crawl. The air smelled of mould and
that indefinable dry and heavy something he recalled from digs
in Egypt. Age or death, either one would do. Strictly speaking, there wasn't much difference between this and browsing through a
subterranean library at the point of imminent collapse. Alright, so
there was a difference. The fate of mankind didn't hinge on this.
As far as he knew...

Two hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-eight seconds later the
obstruction in front of him gave and an avalanche of rubble swept
him into head-on acquaintance with a painfully firm floor. Stone
slabs. Sprawled on his belly he groped for the flashlight he'd lost in
the tumble. At last he found it wedged between a piece of rock and
his left boot. The cover glass was intact, the switch still worked,
and the light snapped on obediently. Pointing it at his face hadn't
been a good idea.

Blinking against a swarm of charcoal blobs on his retinas, he
directed the beam into the room. Gradually the blobs faded to dust
motes dancing in the light. The first thing to move in here in God
knew how long.

The chamber was round and larger than he had expected. Well,
he hadn't really expected anything but, given the locale, the size of
the room came as a surprise to say the least. About two meters in
from the wall a colonnade circled the space. The whole ensemble,
pillars and all, had been carved from rock. Its surfaces looked
perfectly smooth. Too smooth.

The Anasazi highways didn't really explain this, and Daniel felt
that odd prickle starting to rise in the pit of his stomach. He coughed
up some dirt, scrambled to his feet, and slowly wandered around
the arcade. There were no markings of any kind, no ornaments,
nothing to indicate what this place had been used for. Only two
pillars stood out. One was metal, bronze by the looks of it; the
other, directly opposite, shone green... Some sort of observatory?
Over at Pueblo Alto was a notched wall that let you determine
solstice. Which could mean the pillars here represented summer
and winter solstice. Bronze for summer, green for winter. Or the
other way round. But if this was an observatory, then the room
ought to be open to the sky...

Backing out from under the colonnade, he let the beam glide
across the ceiling. No sign of an opening, just the same immaculate
surface spanning the room like a dome. Off the top of his head, he could think of only a few devices capable of cutting stone to
this kind of finish. None of them human, let alone early Native
American.

"So where did you guys learn stonemasonry?"

His shoulder collided with something large and unyielding.
For a split-second as he spun around he had that sensation you'd
commonly associate with being caught red-handed in a Goa'uld
armory. The beam of the flashlight jittered in the darkness, and
he willed his hands to stop shaking and train the light on the
obstacle.

Of course it didn't breathe. It didn't have glowy eyes either. It
was an upright slab of limestone that clearly hadn't been made by
whomever had created the rest of the chamber. The workmanship
was primitive by comparison, with clearly visible chisel marks and
decorations at last. He circled the stele, fingers tracing a pair of
straight lines around the top. The opposite side had a more elaborate
carving, evidently important. It was a relief, framed by a rough,
square cartouche, and -

Daniel took a step back, suddenly feeling cold. A stylized
triangular body, round, faceless head, and upraised arms. The arms
didn't belong, but the image itself was unmistakable. He'd seen
and touched it hundreds of times over the past years.

"Uh-oh."

This shouldn't be here. This so shouldn't be here. Worse, he had
no ready explanation for it. Tuning out the relief and its possible
implications, he concentrated on the rest of the room. The pillars
were familiar somehow. Bronze and green. Bronze and green.
Bronze and green should ring a bell, although at the moment it
stubbornly refused to chime. But at least he knew that it meant
something. He'd have to head back and do some serious research.

He found himself staring at the carving again. It shouldn't be
here.

"General Hammond's gonna love this..."

He pulled out his camcorder and started taping.

So much for letting Thanksgiving roll out quietly.

The plan had been a shower, a beer, and pearls of wisdom by Homer. Instead his phone had been ringing as he'd walked through
the front door. He'd dumped his bags, answered the call, done a
crisp one-eighty, and sprinted back to his truck. After which he'd
still managed to arrive late. So excuse him for cantering into the
briefing room slightly unwashed and in non-reg leisure wear, to the
delight of his CO and assembled team.

"Sorry, sir."

"Take a seat, son," grumbled Major General George S Hammond.
He'd probably wanted to watch The Simpsons as well. "It isn't like
this was scheduled."

True.

Colonel Jack O'Neill slipped into his usual chair at the
conference table and tried to gauge expressions. Teal'c looked
genteelly bemused, which meant that anybody else would look
stunned stupid. Carter looked fascinated, which was a bad thing.
She might choose to expand on her fascination, and then they'd
all be here at least an hour longer than they absolutely had to be.
Daniel looked suspended in mid-diatribe, which pegged him as the
culprit. And what else was new?

Possibly the fact that Daniel was accompanied by twice as many
printouts and reference tomes than he usually dragged around with
him.

"Dr. Jackson's about to brief us on a pretty odd find he's made
at a place called Penasco Blanco in New Mexico," supplied the
General. "Carry on, Dr. Jackson."

"New Mexico?" Jack blinked. "What were you doing in New
Mexico?"

"Camping trip. I got bored."

"You could have come fishing."

"Jack, I think you... uh... missed the point."

"Who says fishing's boring?"

"Daniel Jackson. Perhaps you should continue," Teal'c suggested
smoothly and a tad too fast.

Carter gave a small hiccup-ey sound, like she was clamping
down on a snort, and something weird seemed to be going on with
Hammond's face.

"Dr. Jackson, please?" the General insisted.

On the screen of the TV next to Daniel you could see the grainy,
underexposed image of a large round chamber with lots of columns.
Two of them were slightly bigger than the rest and different in color
and material. Right in the middle of the room reared some kind of
standing stone.

"Sorry `bout the picture quality. All I had was a flashlight...
Right. My initial clue were those two pillars" - Daniel's knuckles
rapped the screen - "bronze and green. Actually bronze and
smaragdus, which is an old word for emerald. They suggest an
origin within the North African Punic culture. The Carthaginians
colonized the Western Mediterranean, including Gibraltar, where
they built a temple..."

Oh here we go! Maybe next time he should just ignore the
excuses and take Daniel fishing. What was the fishing like in
New Mexico? On the notepad in front of him Jack doodled a bass
jauntily flopping through sand.

"... so, thanks to those bronze and emerald columns, Gibraltar
actually became known as `The Pillars of Hercules'. Hercules,
because the Carthaginians associated him with their main deity,
Baal Hammon."

"Baal?"

He hadn't meant to say that. He'd opened his mouth and it had
walked out. Now Carter was goggling, wide-blue-eyed, Are you
okay, sir? Which required the standard Sure, peachy, drop it! stare
in return, combined with the fervent hope that Daniel hadn't picked
up on it. Daniel didn't remember, and Jack felt no inclination to
jog his memory. Once Daniel remembered, he would want to talk
about it, and talking about it featured right at the bottom of Jack
O'Neill's list of Desirable Things To Do.