But it was a quiet half hour and gave Sam time to think. It would be Christmas in just five days, and here she was in the far north of the world instead of at home with family. And no one was missing her. She hadn’t seen her dad for years and as for Mark... The truth was, she didn’t have a family – not really, not anymore. Perhaps she hadn’t since the day she’d lost her mom. And most of the time it didn’t matter; most of the time her life was amazing. But sometimes, especially during the holidays, she felt an absence somewhere inside, a hole she couldn’t fill. And sometimes, as astonishing as her life was, she longed for that sense of belonging she’d lost.
“What’s on your mind, Carter?” the colonel said, startling her. She hadn’t notice him drop back to her side.
She shook her head, glanced over at him. How could she talk to him, of all people, about lost families? “Just trying to figure out what’s going on here, sir,” she said instead.
“Nothing, I hope.”
“Yeah.”
He frowned, kept his eyes straight ahead, and said, “Listen, I think I saw something last night, out in the storm.”
“Really?” His obvious unease spiked a beat of alarm. “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know. Something moving.”
“An animal?”
He shrugged. “Just keep your eyes open.”
“Yes sir.”
He gestured ahead. “Looks like we’re almost there.”
A long, low structure – like a barn – was coming into view. It was probably thirty meters long, single-story, its wood glowing gold in the sunlight.
“Wow,” Daniel said from up ahead. He was talking to Monroe. “You built a shelter over the whole long barrow.”
Monroe nodded. “It’s the only way to keep working on the site through the winter, and it’s a significant enough find to make that necessary.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
A silent beat fell. “I’m sure you’ll find it impressive,” Monroe said at last.
“How close are you to getting inside the actual burial chamber?”
Monroe didn’t answer that, lifting a hand instead to wave at Dr. Gordon who was just emerging from the building. His snow mobile was parked off to the side. “Everything okay, Doug?”
“No,” the other man called back, stomping through the snow to meet them. “The damn door blew open in the night.”
“What?” Monroe started forward.
“You can’t have shut it properly.”
“Of course I shut it!” He looked at the door, then back at Gordon. “Was anything damaged?”
“The generator stalled,” Gordon said, “but I restarted it. Luckily, it seems okay.” He shoved his hood back. “But you need to be more careful.”
“I shut the bloody door,” Monroe insisted, but only beneath his breath. “Look, let’s just get on with this shall we?”
“By all means.” Gordon gave Daniel a scathing look. “Let the inspection begin.”
“It’s not—” Daniel said, then clearly changed his mind. “Just show me what you’ve found and we’ll take it from there.”
Inside the shelter, it was pretty basic. The small generator that provided power for lighting and heating had a snowdrift piled up against it, melting now that it was running again, and a crude bench was fixed to the walls closest to the doors. Past that stood the black entrance to the long barrow – a narrow hole carved into a low mound, no more than two feet high.
“Most of the barrow is underground,” Monroe explained, “which is interesting in itself. It was excavated into the ground, dug into the permafrost itself.”
“Most long barrows,” Daniel explained, for the benefit of the rest of them, “are constructed above ground level.”
“Like pyramids,” Gordon said. “Except without any alien involvement, naturally.”
Daniel gave a tight smile and said, “When you say ‘most of the barrow’ is below ground, how much of it – exactly – have you excavated so far?”
Gordon looked bullish, Monroe uneasy. Neither of them answered.
“Oh for crying out loud,” the colonel said, “you already opened it, didn’t you?”
“And why not?” Gordon protested. “This is my find, my discovery!”
“It was our find,” Monroe corrected, but his voice was quiet, almost as if he didn’t want to be heard. He wasn’t.
“I’m not about to let some crackpot peddler of the ridiculous take the credit for the find of the century,” Gordon carried on. “Of course I opened the burial chamber. You were a fool if you thought I wouldn’t.”
Daniel’s eyebrows shot up almost as fast as the colonel’s slammed down into a scowl. “Do you have any idea what could be down there?” he snapped.
“Yes I do,” Gordon retorted. “One of the greatest discoveries in modern archeology.”
“Or one of—”
Daniel put a placating hand on the colonel’s arm. “I think,” he said to Monroe, “we just need to go down and take a look.”
Monroe glanced at his colleague. “Go ahead,” Gordon said, “play tour guide. I’ll start shoveling the snow before it melts all over the floor.”
Ignoring the jibe, Monroe turned back to Daniel. “The permafrost has resulted in an incredible level of preservation. I think you’ll be impressed.”
“Oh, I already am,” the colonel growled, yanking his arm away from Daniel. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, like he was looking for a weapon that wasn’t there. Sam knew how he felt. “These are really impressive levels of stupidity.”
Monroe frowned and Sam couldn’t really blame him. He couldn’t possibly have any idea of the potential dangers. “I’ll grab a couple of torches,” Monroe said, and headed over to the workbench.
“Sir,” she said as they waited, “you know he can’t really imagine—”
“He can follow orders.”
Her doubt must have shown on her face because, after a pause, the colonel sighed and added, “Or not, I guess. What is it with archeologists and their inability to follow orders?”
“It’s because we’re naturally independent, inquisitive thinkers,” Daniel said.
“Yeah? I thought you were just natural pains in the ass.”
He shrugged. “That too.”
Sam was a little disappointed that the torches Monroe returned with weren’t the flaming variety, but instead heavy duty flashlights. He handed one to her and one to the colonel. “Follow me.”
She glanced at O’Neill. He’d undone his parka, giving him faster access to his sidearm, although he hadn’t drawn it yet. She did the same.
“Let’s go,” the colonel said with a nod to the rest of the team. Together, they followed Monroe down into the burial mound.
It was cold, dank and musty. The passageway was cramped and Sam felt her shoulders brushing each side of the wall as she followed Teal’c, bringing up the rear. Ahead of her, the light from Monroe’s flashlight flitted ahead of them, bouncing off wooden supports holding up the structure.
“You’re sure this place is sound?” the colonel said, glancing upward.
“It’s lasted for three thousand years,” Monroe called back, his voice deadened in the cramped space.
That wasn’t entirely reassuring, but then again they’d been in worse places.
“In terms of grave goods,” Daniel said from somewhere between Teal’c and the colonel, “what did you find?”
There was a hesitation before Monroe said, “Very little beyond the rune stone.” He’d stopped now and Sam peered past Teal’c to glimpse another, narrower, opening. “We were initially disappointed, until we found this chamber.”
“What’s in there?” the colonel said. They were standing close together in the cramped space and she could see his breath misting in the freezing air. Short sharp breaths; he was nervous. She felt a little creeped out herself. Glancing back the way they’d come, she could see the light filtering down from the shelter above
them. All it would take was for someone to fill that hole in…
The colonel shifted, his arm brushing hers, and her attention returned to Monroe. His face was almost monochrome in the shifting shadows cast by the flashlights. “In there, Colonel O’Neill,” he said, “is the burial chamber itself. And, like I said before, there’s a remarkable degree of preservation.”
He looked at them for a moment, as if expecting the prospect of encountering a three- thousand-year-old corpse to spook them. When nobody reacted he gave a half shrug and said, “I’ll go first. One at a time through the doorway – we only opened it yesterday and haven’t had time to reinforce it.”
They hadn’t done a very neat job of it, either, Sam thought as she waited for Teal’c to squeeze himself sideways through the opening. It looked like they’d just burrowed their way through with bare hands; she could still see finger marks around the doorway.
The chamber was obviously larger than the passageway. She felt its size even if she couldn’t see it at first. The air was dryer too, if not warmer, and there was rock and not earth beneath her feet; she could hear the scuff of their boots against it.
“You can see inscriptions on these columns,” Monroe was saying, his flashlight darting over to the sides of the chamber. Sam turned her own beam in the same direction, illuminating stone pillars that ran from the ceiling to the floor, all covered in runes.
“Look familiar?” the colonel asked Daniel.
He just nodded, his glasses glinting in the erratic light.
“We can’t translate it,” Monroe said, “which is very exciting. This actually predates all known runic alphabets. It could be the root of the written Norse language and we have no idea how it got here or who put it here.”
“Exciting,” the colonel said, in a tone that implied the opposite. He nudged Daniel, lifted an eyebrow. Well?
Daniel gave a helpless shrug. “I’ll need to transcribe it,” he said out loud. Then, with a wary glance at Monroe, “It looks like it could be a history of the people who built this place.”
The colonel just nodded, thoughtful.
“And over here,” Monroe carried on, ski boots clicking across the stone floor as he reached the back of the chamber, “is the pièce de résistance. This is the reason we’re so phenomenally excited about—”
He stopped dead.
Sam turned, caught the stricken look on his face. “What?”
In front of him the chamber curved up, like the walls of a cave that had been sandpapered smooth. They glistened in the flashlights beams and she saw symbols written there that were recognizably Asgard, the kind of thing you might see on one of their ships. She could almost smell their technology.
In front of the wall (or was it a control panel?) sat a long stone table, about knee height, which was also polished to a shine. Monroe was staring at it in utter disbelief.
“Monroe?” the colonel said when the silence stretched too long. “Something wrong?”
The archaeologist’s lips moved, his head shook, and he swung his flashlight around the room as if searching for something. “It’s impossible,” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“What?” the colonel said tensely.
Sam felt her muscles tighten. Behind her Teal’c took a breath, drew half a step closer.
“Dr. Monroe?” Daniel prompted.
Monroe whirled back to face them, shading his eyes from the glare of the colonel’s flashlight. “It’s gone,” he said. “It was here, and it’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“The body,” Daniel guessed. “There was a body here, right, and now it’s gone?”
Monroe nodded. “I don’t understand. Who would have taken it?”
The colonel must have drawn his weapon because Sam heard him chamber a round. “Are you sure it was dead?” he said.
“What?” Monroe looked at him like he was crazy. “It was three-thousand years old. A three-thousand-year-old Norse warrior king! Of course it was dead.”
The colonel didn’t answer that. “Carter,” he said, “Teal’c, take a look around.”
“Yes sir.”
“This is insane,” Monroe said, as Sam made her way over to the wall behind the empty dais. “Someone must have taken it.”
“Yeah?” O’Neill said. “Who? Your buddy upstairs?”
Monroe shook his head. “Why would he? We haven’t even catalogued or photographed the find properly. Moving it would do tremendous damage to the integrity of the site. Doug knows that.”
Sam ran her fingers over the smooth walls, tracing the writing. It was definitely Asgard technology, but there was no power. Whatever this was designed to do, it was as dead and cold as the rest of the grave. Turning, she crouched next to the dais. There was a small hexagonal depression, about the size of a baseball, at one end which looked like it was designed to hold something, but she’d need more time to study it before she could figure out exactly what.
“O’Neill,” Teal’c said then. He was standing next to the narrow opening, examining the fingerprints in the dirt walls. “Someone has passed through here, something larger than either Dr. Gordon or Dr. Monroe.”
“You?” the colonel asked, and only half facetiously.
“The thief,” Monroe said. “The grave robber, it must be.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “Well – however it left here – we need to find it.”
“And we need to lock down this site,” the colonel said.
Monroe stared at him, eyes wide. “You can’t. Doug would never permit—” His expression turned bleak. “Oh God, I have to tell Doug. Excuse me.”
Pushing past Teal’c, Monroe slid back into the passageway.
“I’ll go with him,” Daniel offered. “Make sure they don’t do anything stupid.”
Sam watched him go, and then turned to Teal’c. “A Goa’uld is the obvious explanation,” she said in a low voice. “But I don’t sense anything. Do you?”
“I do not,” Teal’c said, crossing the chamber toward them. “If it was a Goa’uld, they are long gone from this place.” He looked at the colonel. “The figure you saw in the storm last night? A human could not survive unprotected in such weather, but a Goa’uld could.”
O’Neill nodded. “My thoughts exactly.” He took a breath, made a decision. “We’ll head back to base camp and contact the SGC. Looks like we’re gonna need backup after all.”
The term FUBAR was circling in Jack’s mind as he held down the talk button on the cabin’s long-wave radio. “Sierra Golf Charlie this is Sierra Golf One Niner, over.”
Nothing came back but static.
“Sierra Golf Charlie this is Sierra Golf One Niner, over.”
Still nothing.
“This is absolutely preposterous!” Gordon hadn’t taken the news of the missing body well, and was storming about in the middle of the living area like a wrathful old hippie. “You!” he said, stabbing a bony finger at Daniel. “You must have engineered this. How else could it possibly have happened?”
Jack ignored him, pressed the talk button again. “Sierra Golf Charlie this is Sierra Golf One Niner, over.”
“Look,” Daniel said, hands up. “I understand how strange this must seem to you, but—”
“Don’t give me platitudes. Do you think I’m a fool? You’ve stolen this discovery right out from under my nose. And, given your disreputable credentials, I can’t say I’m surprised.”
Jack decided to change tack. “IDC Keflavik this is Colonel Jack O’Neill, over.”
Still nothing but dead air.
Carter was watching him from the other side of the room. “Maybe the antenna’s down, sir? I could go out and take a look.”
“Are you kidding?” The snow had started falling even before they’d gotten back to the cabin, cutting short the sorry excuse for a day. And it was howling past the windows now, whipped along by the north wind. “You can check it in the morning – if we get one.”
“But what about backup?”
; He shook his head, shut down the radio. “No one’s flying in this anyway,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait it out.”
She darted a look at Gordon, who’d retreated, fuming, to the kitchen, banging around pots and pans. “It’s going to be a long night, sir.”
“Yeah.” And because he couldn’t put it off any longer, he got to his feet. “Okay, look,” he said to the room in general, but mostly to Gordon and Monroe. “Something hinky’s going on here. We don’t know what, exactly, but at the very least there’s a crazy guy out there with a fetish for dead old men.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows, but Jack ignored him. Gordon, on the other hand, was turning puce. Jack stalled an outburst with a raised hand. “Point is, we need to be on our guard tonight. And we don’t need to be fighting among ourselves.” He looked directly at the archeologist. “And that means you, Indiana.”
“You’ve got a bloody cheek,” Gordon snarled. “How dare you give me orders? You think you can just swan in to any—”
“Look,” Jack growled, his temper starting to fray, “you have no idea what’s happening here. So you’ll do as you’re told or, so help me, I will tie you to a damn chair until we’re done. Because I will not let you jeopardize the lives of my team. Do you understand?”
“I won’t—”
“Do you understand?” It was the kind of bark that he rarely used and he saw Carter tense, giving him an uneasy glance.
Gordon’s lips clamped shut, rebellious but, thankfully, silent.
“Good,” Jack said, forcing himself to take a breath and relax. He’d been on edge since they got here and the missing dead guy wasn’t helping. “So we’re gonna eat, then we’re gonna sleep.” He looked at his team. “I’ll take the first watch, then Teal’c, Daniel and Carter.”
“Watches?” Monroe said. “You really think that’s necessary, Colonel?”
“Well we’re not doing it for fun.”
They ate mostly in silence. Gordon took his meal into the lab and ate alone, while the rest of them sat hunched around the table, periodically glancing out the window as sudden gusts slammed into the cabin.
Stargate SG-1 - Permafrost Page 4
