STARGATE SG-1-19-23-Ouroboros-s08

by Melissa Scott

  “This has been here a long time, Colonel Carter,” Teal’c said, and touched the edge of the platform with the butt of his staff weapon.

  “Yeah.” The stone was chipped and crumbling, the edges of the platform no longer perfectly even. Steps led down into the grass, and the lowest stair was already half swallowed by new growth, thick strands poking up between the stones. “And nobody’s been taking care of it.”

  Daniel was already ahead of them, head down, following some pattern only he could see. It took him to the DHD, and he stooped to examine it, then crouched beside it.

  “Hey! Take a look at this!”

  “What have you got?” Sam moved to join him, the sun already hot on her neck.

  “Some unusual carvings.” Daniel ran his hand over the DHD’s pedestal, beneath the overhanging rim of the dialing device itself.

  “That seems an unusual place to decorate,” Teal’c said.

  “Yeah.” Sam leaned closer, trying to make out the pattern.

  “I don’t think it’s decorative,” Daniel said. “Or not entirely.” He reached into his pocket, found a sheet of paper and a pencil. He laid the paper against the stone and began rubbing the pencil lightly over it. “I mean, there’s definitely a pattern to it, like, oh, calligraphy, but it also says something —”

  He pulled the paper away and sat back on his heels, spreading the paper out so that they all could see.

  “Indeed,” Teal’c said, and Sam nodded.

  “’To look for the stone’?”

  “Yeah.” Daniel squinted at the pedestal again. “And, wait — yeah, there.” He grabbed his pencil again, and a second sheet of paper, began rubbing the graphite over the paper. “I think these are coordinates.”

  He stood up, holding out the paper, and Sam frowned. It looked more like a stylized flower — except that when you looked closely at each petal, it was an Ancient directional marker. “I see it,” she said. “That’s the sunrise sign, and that, plus these, would send us —” She swung back to the east, a few points south of the sun. “Approximately there, thirty meters out.”

  “To look for the stone,” Daniel said. “Janus was here.”

  Sam nodded thoughtfully. “We’d better spread out a little, though. The exact direction of sunrise is going to have changed a little since Janus’s day. And we don’t know the exact season, either.”

  “Which argues that it has to be fairly obvious,” Daniel said. “Janus must have anticipated this.”

  “I don’t know if that follows,” Sam began, but Daniel was already stepping off the platform and wading out into the grass. It reached almost to his shoulders, and Sam sighed at the thought of forcing her way through the thick stems.

  “I must agree, Colonel Carter,” Teal’c said. “The Ancients were long-lived, but — I do not think even Janus planned this far ahead.”

  “We’ll find out,” Sam said, and started into the grass herself. Teal’c moved to her left and did the same.

  The hum was louder down in the sea of grass, and the stalks gave off an odd, pleasant scent when they were bruised, something like apples and musk, but neither. She waded through it, turning back at regular intervals to check her progress, and stopped when she thought she’d gone about thirty meters. The grass rose on all sides, the bent stems behind her already straightening to erase her passage. She keyed her radio.

  “Daniel? Anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Teal’c?”

  There was a little pause, and Sam frowned. There had been no sign of life, no evidence that anyone had been here in decades, but it was always possible they’d missed something. She keyed her radio again.

  “Come in, Teal’c.”

  “I believe I have found something,” Teal’c said. “It appears to be the stone.”

  Sam pushed her way through the thick stems of grass, came out at last into a small clearing. It would have been visible from the air, she thought, but of course they hadn’t sent a UAV. The stone was a huge rectangular slab, dull gray, its surface spotted here and there with patches of lichen. It rose a little less than the height of her knee, and there was no mistaking it for something natural. The edges were neatly carved, if dulled by weather, and a circle at least a meter wide had been carved more or less in the center of the stone, the lines only slightly blurred. Teal’c knelt at its foot, frowning thoughtfully at a smaller set of carvings. It was a series of shallow depressions arranged in a five by six grid that looked vaguely familiar. Or maybe it had been familiar to Jolinar — the fleeting connection was without context, without detail. She had long ago adjusted to those random flashes of another self, and looked from the grid to the circle. Except it wasn’t a circle, she realized. It was an enormous snake, curled into a ring and biting its own tail. The scales had been more lightly carved, were more worn than the rest of the carving, but she could still make out the details. And it was a symbol she had seen before, a symbol for infinity.

  There was a thrashing from the grass behind her, and Daniel joined them, his eyebrows rising as he took in the stone and its markings.

  “Ouroboros,” he said.

  “What?” Sam gave him a wary glance.

  “The snake that eats its own tail.” Daniel moved further along the side of the stone slab, studying the carving. “It’s a symbol for infinity, and also for alchemy, for the transformation of base matter into gold, or matter into energy. And also —” He looked over his shoulder, his smile suddenly mischievous. “In Earth’s mythology, it’s associated with the god Janus.”

  “Oh, come on,” Sam protested, but it made a certain amount of sense. Everything they’d seen of Janus so far suggested that he was just that arrogant. “If he went to all this trouble to hide his secret lab, why would he carve his name on the front door?”

  “It may not be his actual laboratory,” Daniel answered. “It may just tell just how to get there — give us the next clue for the puzzle.”

  “Then you will want to see this, Daniel Jackson.” Teal’c covered one of the stone pits with his thumb, and there was a faint, almost musical whistle from the stone. Definitely musical, Sam amended, and she went to one knee beside the Jaffa.

  “Do that again.”

  Teal’c covered the same pit, and this time she was sure she heard a note. He nodded, covering a second hole, and the sound changed.

  “Wait, what have you got there?” Daniel crouched beside them.

  “I’m not entirely certain,” Teal’c said. “But I believe it is intended to create sounds of specific pitch.”

  “Yeah.” Daniel frowned at the grid, shoving his glasses back up onto his nose. “Yes, definitely, that’s a formation that we’ve seen the Ancients use for musical notation. But why here?”

  “You said it yourself,” Sam answered. “A puzzle?”

  “Yes, but —” Daniel stopped abruptly, his frown deepening, and covered the pit in the lower left corner of the grid, cocking his head as though he was trying to memorize the sound. “Although, if it’s a puzzle —” He shrugged off his pack, and began covering holes, one after the other. Sam blinked, and then winced as she recognized the pattern. He was playing the children’s chant, tisklamor taksanat, and sure enough as the last note sounded, there was a rumble from inside the stone. Sam grabbed her P90 and pushed herself to her feet, and she heard the click as Teal’c armed his staff weapon. Daniel didn’t move, still crouching in the dirt at the base of the stone, still didn’t move as the stone split above the musical grid, two thin slabs sliding apart to reveal a pattern inlaid with gold. Nothing else happened, and Sam slowly lowered her weapon.

  “Ancient numbers?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Daniel ran a careful hand across the carved surface. “It looks like some kind of sequence, but I can’t figure out the intent. There’s a gap here, see? And one here.”

  “It’s another puzzle,” Sam said. She unfastened her P90, and went to one knee beside Daniel.

  “OK, I’ll buy that,” Daniel said. “But �
��”

  “You’ve seen them before,” Sam said. “You’re supposed to guess the next number in the sequence — figure out what the formula is.” She narrowed her eyes at the stone. “Give me your notebook.”

  Daniel handed it over, and she transcribed the carving into Arabic numerals, considered the result. No, it didn’t make sense, not completely.

  “That’s a nine,” Daniel said, pointing, and she corrected the number.

  “Got it,” she said, and looked at the stone. “So how do we enter it? Just — write it in?”

  “I think we need gold,” Daniel said. “To match the other numbers.”

  “Great.” Sam sat back on her heels. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a class ring or something?”

  “Not with me,” Daniel answered.

  “Perhaps this will suffice,” Teal’c said. He held out a cylinder about the size of his thumb, and Daniel took it warily.

  “Trade gold,” Teal’c said. “I believe it is soft enough to mark the stone.”

  Daniel tested it on the rock beside the musical grid and, after a couple of tries, was able to leave a more or less solid line. “OK,” he said. “So what’s the answer?”

  Sam looked back at the notebook. “Well, assuming I’ve worked out the formula correctly, the first missing number is 58, and the last one is 172.”

  Daniel took the notebook from her, transcribed the numbers into Ancient characters. “OK,” he said again. “Here we go.”

  He leaned forward, stretching to reach the first gap in the sequence, and carefully wrote in the first number. Teal’c had risen to his feet again, and his staff weapon was primed and ready. Sam grabbed her P90 as Daniel inscribed the second number, bracing herself for whatever happened next.

  Nothing happened, not for long enough that she was starting to rethink her calculations, and then something beneath the stone gave a deep groan, and the slab split neatly down the middle. The two sides pivoted apart, stone grating on stone, to reveal a set of steps leading down into darkness.

  “Well, we’ve got something,” she said, and flicked on the light attached to her weapon. Daniel produced a flashlight, and shone it ahead of them as well.

  The steps stretched down for at least ten, maybe twelve feet, ending in a bare stone floor that seemed to match the material of the slab. The air smelled dry and dusty, but not foul. Clearly the chamber had had some ventilation over the years. “Cover us, Teal’c,” she said, and started down the stairs, Daniel on her heels.

  At the bottom of the steps she stopped, swinging the P90 to cover the room, its light playing across what looked like control consoles, running parallel to the side walls. Light bounced back from the end of the room: a wall of glass, no, a huge window, stood between the consoles and something at the far end of the underground room. Otherwise the place was empty except for a thin drift of dust, and she relaxed a little, moving toward the glass wall. Daniel came with her, tilting his light so that the reflection was minimized.

  The space beyond the glass was smaller, a narrow room narrowed further by what looked like some kind of capacitor system. There was a platform in the center, and on the wall above it was carved another ouroboros, this one filled with gold.

  “Well,” Daniel said. “I guess we’ve found the secret lab.”

  “Yeah.” Sam turned her back on the ouroboros, swung her light around the other room. It had to be the control room for whatever it was the inner room did, and as her light flicked over the consoles, she thought she recognized some of the systems. “I think we’ve got it. I think — it looks to me as though this is what Janus was working on, his system that was going to supersede the Stargates. And that means —”

  Daniel nodded. “Atlantis.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Testing

  JACK settled his body armor more comfortably on his shoulders, and tried to pretend he was completely unaware of the paperwork still piled on his desk. It’ll get done, he told himself, just as he’d told Davis, and wished he believed it any more than Davis did. Still, this was an important discovery, the biggest Ancient lab since they’d opened up Antarctica, and they had definitely needed people with the ATA gene to help initialize the systems. And he had the ATA gene, even if Sergeant Ito of SG-12 had already done the human light switch thing, and he needed to take a look at the place: two birds with one stone.

  He accepted his P90 from the hovering sergeant, and made his way into the gateroom. Dr. Lee was there already, along with SG-7 — and he was pleased to see that Major Perry had only issued Lee a sidearm. That was iffy enough, on past performance, but a lot better than giving him a submachine gun.

  Perry came to attention at his entrance. “Ready to go, sir.”

  Jack returned the salute, letting his eyes roam around the gateroom one last time. There was a pallet of equipment waiting, too, lights and a generator recognizable among the unmarked boxes. “Got everything you need?”

  “Dr. Lee says we do,” Perry answered, and Lee gave him a preoccupied smile.

  “Yes. I mean, assuming that we’ve read the situation correctly —”

  “I’m sure you have,” Jack said, and turned to look up at the control room window. “You can go ahead and dial, Sergeant.”

  “Initiating dialing sequence.” The voice echoed from the loudspeakers, and Lee took a quick step back, making sure he was far enough away from the gate. The ring turned, the chevrons lit and locked, and the wormhole opened with a kawhoosh. It fell back, steadied to a gently rippling pool, and Jack looked up at the window again.

  “Keep the lights on, Sergeant,” he called, and looked at Perry. “All right, Major. You have a go.”

  It had been a while since he’d been through the gate, long enough that the sensation was strange instead of completely familiar. He paused at the edge of the gate platform, letting the feelings settle, scanned the area over the top of his sunglasses. Sure enough, there was a lot of the tall grass, but SG-1 and SG-12 had cut a path through it, and Perry’s team was already manhandling the pallet toward that gap. Lee was standing frankly open-mouthed, staring up into the pale sky, and Jack clapped him on the shoulder.

  “You need to get out more, Doc,” he said, and started toward the lab.

  The two halves of the stone slab had folded back like the lid of a sarcophagus — not a happy image, that, and he was glad to hear the sound of voices from the base of the steps and hear the familiar whine of a generator. The lab itself was huge, large enough that the lights didn’t reach to all the corners, and the air was cool, but the main thing, the thing you couldn’t miss, was the giant gold snake on the back wall. There were more lights set up there, and a door had been opened in the barrier, power cords snaking through.

  “General O’Neill!”

  That was Carter, coming up with a grin and a neat salute. There was dust in her hair and smeared across her black tee shirt, and she looked intensely pleased with herself.

  “Colonel Carter,” Jack said. “What have you got for me?”

  “One almost intact Ancient installation,” Carter answered. “Pretty much as advertised, sir.”

  “I don’t know.” Jack looked around. “It didn’t come with one of those face-grabber things.”

  “Which is probably a good thing.” That was Daniel, coming to join them with his notebook in his hand. “They never seem to work out very well in the long run.”

  That was true enough, so Jack ignored it. “Any idea what it was meant to do?”

  The other two exchanged glances, and for a moment Jack was very aware that he was on the outside. They were SG-1, and he was in command of the SGC, and — he shoved the thought aside, made himself concentrate on Carter’s response.

  “We’re getting an idea, sir,” she began. “I’m pretty sure it’s one of Janus’s installations, and I think he was trying to build at least the next generation of Stargates, and maybe something that would make them obsolete altogether.”

  “And, you know, I think I’m entitled to a quick ‘I
told you so,’” Daniel added.

  “Maybe,” Jack said. He waved at the gold snake on the back wall. “And that’s it?”

  “We think so, sir.” Carter looked as though she wanted to open her laptop and start showing him formulae, and Jack shook his head.

  “Bottom line, Carter.”

  “Sergeant Ito got all the consoles initialized,” she said, “so we’ve got everything running on stand-by right now. Everything you see in here is to control and power the devices behind the wall — which isn’t glass, by the way, but an ultrapure form of carbon. Almost like a wall of diamond, in fact. Most of what’s in here is either stuff we’ve seen before, or very similar to things we’ve seen, either in Antarctica or the other installations. It’s power control devices, computers, systems to monitor and record results. But all of this is ancillary to the main device, and there — we’re still not sure what it does.”

  “We do know what it’s meant to do,” Daniel said. There was an edge to his voice that suggested there was still some disagreement about that. “I’ve been able to pull records from the computers and translate the crucial ones, and it’s just what Sam said. Janus was trying to build a — well, I guess you’d call it a super Stargate system, one that could dial Atlantis and possibly other extra-galactic addresses. It looks as though there are placeholders in the programming for eight and even nine-symbol gate addresses.”

  “Yes, but it’s also clear that he wasn’t successful in making the transport part work,” Carter said.

  “That’s actually debatable,” Daniel said. “The latest entries strongly suggest that he’d made a breakthrough.”

  “So why didn’t he follow it up?” Jack asked.

  “It looks as though the other Ancients shut him down,” Daniel said. “Or he had to abandon the place to avoid being shut down, because it looks like he was planning to come back.”