Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 (4 page)

Jetlagged and panting in the heat, Daniel stumbled over rough
paths covered in crushed white rock. He'd only arrived this
morning, after ten solid hours of sampling the joys of commercial
air travel, followed by an endless car journey over diabolical roads. Either side of him, sweat-glistening faces peered up from holes in
the ground. The diggers had taken cover at Kelly's passage, which
generally was a good move. He muttered "Hi" and "B'slama" and
tried not to lose sight of the Professor.

She'd careened to a stop in front of a trapdoor. Electric cables
coiled from under the panels to a nearby generator. On the door
itself someone had pinned a sign that read No Trespassing/Defense
d'Entrer. Kelly undid a padlock and chain and flung back the
door panels. A sparse row of overhead lights in wire mesh cages
illuminated a steep flight of stairs. At the bottom a corridor stretched
away into the shadows.

"Watch where you put your feet," she growled, thundering down
the stone steps without the slightest concern for what she might be
treading on.

"Do as I say..." Mumbling to himself, Daniel tiptoed down the
stairs into merciful coolness. He followed the dimly lit passage
until he emerged in a lofty room.

Domed. Round. With columns.

"Oops..." he whispered.

"Quite something, isn't it?" Softening up for once, Kelly stood
framed by two pillars on the far side, smiling around the chamber
like a proud mom showing off her kid. "This is unique."

No, actually... Daniel ran a hand over the surface of a wall. The
same uncanny smoothness. The same colonnade, complete with the
two odd pillars out. Bronze dull with age, the smaragdus retaining
its sheen. The main difference to Peflasco Blanco was a circle of six
stelae, concentric to the pillars.

"Matham, the insolent little brat, thinks it's a tophet." Kelly
scowled.

"A tophet?"

"A place for human sacrifice."

"I know that, Professor."

She snorted, quite possibly in disbelief. "That blood-curdling
theory's been bandied about for ages. Pat and lurid and guaranteed
to sell."

"Interesting. Historical propaganda, huh?"

Another snort. "Most of what we know of Punic history was written by the worst enemies of Carthage. How would you rate the
credibility?"

"The Romans... Diodorus?"

"Amongst others." She still clutched Daniel's Polaroids and
waved them at the stelae. "Take a closer look. Chop-chop! And
when you're through, you'd better start explaining, duckie!"

Oh yeah. She'd love that one. What she'd love even more was
the contingent from Area 51 that would firmly and politely push
her out of here just as soon as he gave the word.

Daniel walked over to the nearest stele, stepping carefully, as
though the floor might suddenly shift under him. White, porous
limestone. Chisel marks. Rough surfaces. The same decorative
lines around the top and bottom. A cartouche. Not the Sign of Tanit.
Subtle additions, reflecting a different esthetic perhaps, but there
could be no doubt.

Orion.

He sucked in a sharp breath, moved on, almost running.

Canis Minor... Bootes... Pisces... Andromeda... Corona
Australis...

And an empty base at the center of the circle. One stele was
missing. The seventh symbol set apart from the six coordinates.
Just as on the Giza cover stone. It was a Stargate address, minus the
point of origin. That had somehow found its way to New Mexico.

Kelly's voice drifted into his consciousness from lightyears
away. "Initially I thought it might be a shrine to Hammon but with
what you've shown me there" - she waved the Polaroids again
- "I'd say Tanit is by far the more likely candidate. Obviously her
stele had pride of place."

"Obviously..."

The word `stele' must have sparked the Professor's memory.
"So. Where is it?"

Symbols were racing across the screen, rapidly changing shape,
transforming one to the next. The dialing computer was searching
its files for an address that would match a permutation of the glyphs
Daniel had faxed back. It had been running for over three minutes
now, which was unusual. Normally it took a minute or less. The longest search ever had clocked in at two minutes and forty-one
seconds.

Now they were approaching the four-minute-mark.

Suddenly the hypnotic flow of glyphs ground to a dead stop
and at the center of the screen a legend showed in red: No Match
Found.

"What does this mean, Major Carter?"

"It means it's found no match, Teal'c." Colonel O'Neill, being
helpful.

Sam hid a quick grin and kicked the swivel chair around to face
her CO and Teal'c who'd both been hovering in the control room
ever since the fax had come in.

"It means the address Daniel has sent us isn't on the Abydos
Cartouche or -"

"Not on the Abydos Cartouche?" The Colonel looked
a little pained. "Carter, last time we got a batch of those I was
communicating in a weird variant of Latin and building doohickeys
nobody could figure out. There's gotta be something cruvis with
that computer of yours."

"No, sir. Nothing wrong." This time she didn't bother to hide the
grin and shook her head emphatically. "I've run a couple of known
addresses against the program, just to make sure. They came up.
It's definitely not there."

"How come?"

"Not a clue, sir."

His show of skepticism almost made her laugh. Or scream
in frustration, depending. The next move would be a request to
Think of something, Carter! Sam supposed she might as well get
a head start. Last time we got a batch of those... Back when he'd
been communicating in that weird variant of Latin and building
doohickeys nobody - including Major Dr. Samantha Carter - could
figure out, he'd also been playing with the dialing computer. Until
General Hammond had ordered him prised off the hardware, that
was.

"Uh... Sir?"

"What?'

"You gave me an idea."

"I did?" Fists stuffed into the pockets of his pants, Colonel
O'Neill bounced on his toes and seemed inordinately pleased with
himself.

"Yep." Sam smiled. "A hunch, anyway. You said it yourself just
now. You inputted a whole bunch of new `gate addresses into the
dialing computer."

"Don't remind me..." The bouncing stopped. "Besides, if it
were one of those, it still should have popped up, right?"

"Right. But we didn't let you finish, did we? The General had
you stopped. What if you didn't get round to -"

"Inputting this one."

"Precisely." She turned the chair 15° east towards Teal'c. "What
are the odds of an address being neither on the Abydos Cartouche
nor in the Ancients' repository?"

Teal'c pondered this for a few moments. "I believe they are
negligible, Major Carter. An omission from the Abydos Cartouche
may be due to a variety of reasons. However, considering that the
Ancients built the Stargate system, it is most unlikely that they
should have forgotten one of its planets."

"Well, they did manage to lose a whole city, didn't they? Why
not a planet?" proposed the Colonel.

"Because they didn't have the resources of the Pentagon at their
disposal, sir?" Sam asked mildly. "Besides, they didn't lose it.
They hid it."

"You're starting to sound like me." He'd ignored her quibble
and his tone betrayed a worrying amount of satisfaction. "So what
do you suggest we do next?"

`There's one way of finding out. Dial

Her reply was cut short by the clatter of highly polished
regulation shoes rattling down the metal staircase at the back of
the room.

"Anything yet, Major?"

"In a manner of speaking, sir..." Then she gave General
Hammond the same answer she'd just given Colonel O'Neill and
Teal'c.

"I'm sure Dr. Jackson will be intrigued to hear it," the General
said, distinctly unenthused.

"When's he due back, sir?"

"Sometime tomorrow night. He'll be bringing company."

"Company?"

"Dr. Siobhan Kelly." Hammond's gloom intensified. "She wasn't
exactly pleased when we shut her down, so she pulled some strings.
The British Secretary of Defence happens to be an Oxford graduate,
and I've just spent three quarters of an hour on the phone listening
to the Old Boys' Network in operation. The Brits' position is that,
since they're covering up for our small scale invasion of Tunisian
soil, they're due some form of return. Else 10 Downing Street will
find itself unable to keep the lid on the Stargate Program. Dr. Kelly
is to be considered a representative of the British Government and
will accompany any mission undertaken as a result of her discovery
at Kerkouane."

Colonel O'Neill's objection got as far as "Ali!" and withered
under a baleful stare from his commanding officer.

"Save it, Jack. It's nonnegotiable. They've got us over a barrel.
If the Tunisians had got wind of the activities of the Area 51 team,
we'd have a diplomatic nightmare on our hands."

"You know me, sir. Always happy to welcome a new scientist
on the team. I'm getting used to the old ones, and we don't want to
open the door to complacency, do we?"

he's not that bad once you get to know her, Jack." It was
remarks like this that occasionally made George Hammond
wonder about the state of Dr. Jackson's amnesia or recall or the
gray zone in between. By his own account, the young man had
been close to pushing Professor Kelly off the plane somewhere
above Labrador.

Not that Hammond blamed him. Personally, he harbored an
ugly little notion of the corridors of Whitehall reverberating with
laughter as Her Majesty's Secretary of Defence told his pals how
he'd saddled some puffed-up Yank flyboy with an aging Medea.

He'd thought it only polite to welcome the lady upon her arrival
last night. As far as wasted efforts went, this one had been a rare
beauty. She'd treated him like a slightly retarded bellhop and
begun listing the things she objected to in the VIP quarters. None
of which compared to the fuss she'd raised when he'd informed
her that, yes, he knew perfectly well who she was, and, no, that
still wouldn't gain her admission to a classified briefing. All things
considered, Hammond was beginning to question whether SG-1
would ever forgive him for this one. Then again, given the current
state of affairs, the mission might not get underway today or at any
time in the foreseeable future.

Armed SFs hung around the fringes of the `gate room, shuffling
their feet. Colonel O'Neill stood leaning against the wall under the
control room window, cap pulled over his eyes, shuffling his mouth.
Teal'c towered next to him, deaf to the mutterings and looking
like he'd entered a state of catatonic kelno'reem. Dr. Jackson had
dropped back under that cloud of doom from which he'd briefly
emerged to deliver his optimistic assessment. Half an hour ago
SG-7 had come back from a survey mission and been mightily
surprised to encounter this illustrious reception committee.

At last the unmistakable sounds of a blazing argument drifted
from the C Corridor. Jack shut up, bobbed off the wall, and raised
the bill of his cap to half-mast; Teal'c opened one eye; and the cloud of doom swallowed Dr. Jackson.

Two seconds later Dr. Siobhan Kelly strode through the blast
door, a case study in how appearances could be deceiving: granny
bun, quick black eyes, a round face that seemed composed of
soft little clumps of putty. She was decked out in a brown tweed
suit, pink linen blouse, woolen socks, and sturdy boots. A scuffed
Gladstone bag completed the ensemble.

"Cool," murmured Jack O'Neill, voice carefully pitched to
ensure plausible deniability. "The long-lost love-child of Miss
Marple and Conan the Librarian."

At a safe distance behind the Professor followed Major Carter,
clutching a battle dress uniform. "Sorry about the delay, sirs. I -"

"Oh shut up!" Kelly snapped. "I refuse to wear those ridiculous
pyjamas!"

The ridiculous pajamas might have been an improvement, but
General Hammond seriously doubted the tactical benefit of pointing
it out. "Stand down, Major."