An ear-splitting crack and dust and morsels of shattered stone rained down from the lintel above her head.
"Bloody Nora!" Siobhan Kelly jerked around.
"Do I have your attention now?" That nasty black box of a gun draped across his midriff, he came swaggering towards her like something out of those Rambo films and had the nerve to grin.
"You shot at me!"
"I didn't shoot at you. If I'd shot at you, you wouldn't be complaining."
This wasn't funny. "Of all the
"Ah!" A surprisingly elegant hand flew up and he took off his sunglasses, hard and angry eyes belying the grin. "In case you hadn't noticed, Professor, we're not in Kansas anymore. Carter here explained a few facts to you just now, but maybe you didn't get the message. So -"
"Oh please! I've been conducting excavations since before you were an itch in your daddy's trousers. Do you have any idea of who I am?"
"One huge honkin' pain in the mikta. I, on the other hand, am the guy who's under orders to bring you back in one piece, and if you interrupt me again I'll gag you. We didn't get a chance to introduce ourselves, so, for the record, I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill. Colonel means you'll do exactly as I tell you when I tell you, and if I'm not around, you'll listen to Major Carter. Are we clear on this?"
SABINE C. BAUER
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.
"It's a title," clarified Daniel. "Basically it means `Lord Hammon'."
Oh yeah? So Baal would be Lord what? Lord Goddamn Sadistic Son of a Bitch?
"It still doesn't explain the finish of the chamber," Carter threw in, mercifully yanking the applecart into a completely different direction. "I've analyzed those samples you brought. They look as though the stone was grown. Literally. Something's been done to its crystalline structure on the molecular level. The nearest thing to it that we know of would be the Tok'ra tunnels, but this is much more refined."
"You're saying we've got the Tok'ra digging up our backyard?" Jack frowned.
"You have not, O'Neill," replied Teal'c. "This is unlike any structure the Tok'ra would create."
"That's reassuring."
"Uh... Jack?" Daniel was wearing his If you think this sucks, wait for the other shoe face and pushed a button on the remote. "Check this out."
The image zoomed in on the monolith at the center of this tailorgrown cave. Then it zoomed in further until the edges of the stone disappeared from the frame, leaving a rough white surface and, on it, a clearly visible relief:
"Holy Hannah..." whispered Carter.
"I couldn't have put it better myself, Major." The comers of Hammond's mouth twitched. "I've already contacted Groom Lake. A team of specialists from Area 51 has sealed off the site and is conducting tests as we speak."
"Obviously the `gate glyph for the Tauri." Deserting his spot by the monitor, Daniel poured himself some water. "But there is a chance that it's simply a huge coincidence," he remarked between two sips.
Teal'c's left eyebrow said Bull!
Jack couldn't have put it better himself. "Arms aside, how huge a coincidence are we talking about, Daniel? Cosmic?"
"It's Punic, and the -"
"Nah."
"Huh?"
"Puny's more like" - Jack's thumb and forefinger pinched a quarter inch of air between them - "so."
"Punic, sir." His 21C grinned. "From Phoenicia."
"Wrong continent, Carter. Phoenicia is in Asia," commented Jack, looking smug. "The puny guys are from North Africa.
"Which would be the problem." Obviously Dr. Jackson wasn't buying. "I mean, apart from the cross-fertilization. I got thrown by that, plus I'm not exactly firm on Punic cultures, so I never recognized it until I found that stele. It's a religious symbol, the so-called `Sign of Tanit'. Now, Tanit was a Punic deity commonly identified with Ishtar or Astarte or Ashtoreth, all of which were just different names for a prominent goddess of fertility in the ancient 11
"Ah!" The stack of books was at least twenty inches high, and Jack wasn't about to languish through a detailed precis on each of its components. Not quietly, anyway. "We trust you. What's it mean?"
"A while back someone hatched a wild theory about the Phoenicians sailing to the New World and leaving their footprints all over the place. Wacky, but it may explain this. Coincidence, in other words."
"So what about the technology used on the stone? See, last time somebody hatched a wacky theory, the Air Force ended
up building this facility under Cheyenne Mountain... It's called Stargate Command," Carter observed drily. "We've also found out that the Goa'uld were the common denominator. No coincidence, in other words."
"I just wanted to give you the alternative." Adjusting his glasses, Daniel dropped into a chair next to her. "Interestingly, the people who supposedly built Peflasco Blanco were called Anasazi. That's a Hopi word, and it means `Ancient Enemy'. Draw your own conclusions."
"An exceedingly apposite name."
"My thought precisely, Teal'c."
Jack sketched a mustache on his bass. "Okay, so if I understand you correctly these Punic guys set sail one fine day, got lost, and had trouble blending in with the local crowd because they'd brought along a Goa'uld?"
"I doubt they got lost. The Phoenicians invented navigation. Otherwise, yeah, it's possible. Some of them may have bailed out when the Romans invaded Carthage in 146 BC." Daniel shrugged. "As for the rest, I simply don't know enough about the culture. However..."
"However?"
"An Oxford University team has just dug up a whole new temple precinct in Tunisia. I've been comparing pictures, and it could be where this stele came from. The leader of the dig is a Dr. Kelly. She's an authority on Punic cultures. I'd like to show her what we've got."
"Is that advisable, Daniel Jackson?"
Going by Hammond's frown, he had the same problem with this as Teal'c. Or Colonel O'Neill for that matter.
"Daniel -"
"I know, I know. But what do you think she'll do? Go public?" Daniel gave a wry grin. "As far as she's concerned I'm a total flake. My academic reputation's shot to bits. I promise you, someone like Kelly'd rather bite her tongue off than admit she even talked to me."
"Point taken, Dr. Jackson." General Hammond shifted forward in his chair, palms flat on the table. Wrap-up time. "So where does this leave us?"
"With a lot of loose ends, sir," Daniel acknowledged. "Unless I get your permission to see a lady about an artifact."
Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 Page 1
