STARGATE SG-1 29 Hall of the Two Truths

by Susannah Parker Sinard

  Daniel, Jack noticed, was shaking his head again.

  “I don’t think we did escape, Sam,” he said in that solemn voice that always preceded what was sure to be bad news. “And I wouldn’t trust the story Martouf told you either. I think there’s something else going on here, something we haven’t figured out yet. I’m pretty sure this is just part of the whole journey. They wanted us here, like this, so we can all go to the Hall of Judgment together.”

  “For what reason, Daniel Jackson?” said Teal’c.

  “I honestly don’t know, Teal’c,” Daniel shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

  “No. We won’t,” said Jack, curtly, shifting his weapon. “Because we’re not going.” He didn’t give a damn about the ‘why’. It was obvious now — they were nothing but rats in someone’s maze. Well, he was done being a lab rat. And his people were done too. “If Carter’s right, and there’s a Stargate on this planet, then that’s where we’re headed. The Hall of Two Truths, or whatever the hell it’s called, is going to have to wait until I’m really dead.”

  “But Jack,” Daniel objected, “we have no idea where the Stargate is. Last thing I knew, I was in a desert — and suddenly I woke up in some place that looks like the ruins of a gothic cathedral. Who knows where the gate might actually be?”

  There was a simple answer to that. “Carter knows. Right?”

  Jack saw her grimace. That was never a good sign.

  “Sorry, sir. But no, I haven’t a clue. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this place and I honestly wouldn’t even begin to know which way to go.”

  “But you said there were two doorways — so if one came here and the other went to the Stargate, let’s just go back and take the other one.” It seemed straightforward enough, but by the look on Carter’s face Jack had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “I don’t think we can, sir. They weren’t ordinary doorways. I think they had some kind of transporter mechanism in them. When I went through, it was a similar sensation to using the rings.” She looked apologetic. “I don’t know what happened after that. I woke up back there just a while ago.” She indicated the general direction from which she’d come. “I think, maybe, I was out for quite a while.”

  “I too experienced a similar sensation when I chose the Red Gate,” Teal’c told them. “The experience was unusual, but as Major Carter pointed out, not unlike the transportation rings. I would not be surprised if they shared a similar origin.”

  “Ancient technology,” Carter clarified.

  “Indeed.”

  She nodded. “That would explain a lot.”

  Jack was lost. “Carter?”

  “Sir, we know that the technology the Goa’uld use is only a fraction of what the Ancients must have constructed. I mean, look at the Ancient Repository of Knowledge. Its contents are so vast the human brain is incapable of containing all of it, let alone comprehending it.”

  “Tell me,” he inserted, dryly. She smiled a bit.

  “Who knows what else the Ancients might have developed, or what the capability of that technology might be? Daniel was in a desert; I woke up and found myself in the middle of a blizzard.” She looked at Teal’c.

  “I was in an environment that very much resembled Chulak.”

  “Yeah. Well, I woke up in Vancouver. It rained almost the whole time,” Jack said, irritably. “What’s your point?”

  “I’m just saying, sir, that whoever is behind all of this — and whatever their purpose is — I’ll wager they’re using Ancient technology to make it all happen.”

  Jack sighed. There were days when he wished he had retained even a fraction of what the Asgard had taken out of his head. Maybe then he could at least keep up. At the moment, though, he still wasn’t sure where this left them.

  “Good for them,” he tossed out, wryly. “But again, I ask — what’s the point? So they used Ancient tech to gaslight us. How does that help us find the Stargate?”

  Carter looked crestfallen. “I guess it doesn’t,” she admitted. “But my point was, since I think we’re now talking about some kind of transporter device being used in those gateways, then the Stargate could really be anywhere. Anywhere on the entire planet.”

  “Ah.” Well. That certainly took the wind out of their sails. Jack took a deep breath and released it slowly. It sounded like it was time for Plan B.

  If only he had one.

  “Look, I know you don’t like the idea, Jack, but I think our only option is to keep playing along and see where this all ends up,” Daniel said. “Once we find out why this has happened to us, then maybe we’ll be able to figure out a way to get home. But until we know the purpose to all of this, I think going off half-cocked is only going to make the situation just that much more difficult.”

  Daniel probably had a point, even though it didn’t sit particularly well with Jack. Something about being some Goa’uld’s lab experiment just rubbed him the wrong way. He looked at Carter.

  “What about you? You’re the one with the story about the uber-evil Goa’uld. Won’t we be playing right into their hands if we keep heading to this Two Truths place?”

  Carter thought for a moment. “I don’t know, sir.” She sounded tired. “At the time, Martouf’s explanation made sense. But given what Daniel said, I’m pretty sure now that all of it was a lie. I shouldn’t have let myself fall for any of it.”

  Jack’s anger simmered again at how the Martouf doppelganger must have manipulated her. Sons of bitches.

  “I agree with Daniel Jackson,” offered Teal’c, in the awkward moment that followed Carter’s admission. “There is a purpose to all of this which we must uncover. It would diminish the ordeal each of us has been through were we to never understand why we were forced to endure such difficulties.”

  “Et tu, Teal’c?” Jack groaned, but the Jaffa merely looked at him somberly and he remembered again what Teal’c had said about believing Rya’c to be dead. And Daniel had just spent the past few days with his dead wife.

  In retrospect, maybe he’d gotten off easy, all things considered.

  And maybe finding out who was responsible wouldn’t be a bad thing either. He’d have a word or two to say to them, when he did.

  “Fine. We’ll follow the breadcrumbs.” Under his breath he added, “Let’s just hope we don’t end up in someone’s pot of stew.”

  At least the light was better now. Dawn had brought up the dimmer switch as they’d been talking. However, it did nothing to illuminate which way they needed to go. After several days of having only a single path to follow, it was odd that this, of all places, should have none. The four of them made short recons, all within hailing distance — Jack wasn’t about to lose track of them again — but there was no obvious path anywhere.

  “West,” said Daniel finally. “I think we should go west.”

  “Random?” Jack asked.

  Daniel shook his head. “No. In the Ancient Egyptian belief system, the west was always the direction of the land of the dead. Toward the setting sun. So it makes sense that we ought to keep going west if we’re going to reach the Hall of the Two Truths.”

  Jack looked at the other two for input, but Teal’c seemed to have no opinion and Carter just shrugged.

  “Great. Then west it is,” he decided. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.

  “Um — you do know that it’s entirely possible that on this planet the sun may actually set in the east,” mentioned Carter. “It completely depends on the direction of rotation of the planet. I’m just saying,” she added when the others simply stared at her without comment.

  Oh yeah. It was Carter all right. No doubt now.

  “Does that make a difference, Daniel?” Jack asked, just to be sure.

  “Mmm. No. It shouldn’t. I think we’re safe in assuming that the direction of the setting sun would be enough of a guide, regardless of whether it’s actually called west or not. In fact —”

  “Goo
d.” Jack cut him off and strode past him, keeping his back to the rising sun. The sooner they got to this Hall the sooner they’d know what they were dealing with.

  And then, maybe if they were really lucky, they could all go home.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “I think it’s a maze.”

  Sam could practically hear the colonel’s eyes roll.

  “Really, Daniel. Thank you. I had no idea.”

  “I’m just saying,” Daniel continued, unperturbed. “That the concept of a maze or a labyrinth as an obstacle to a certain goal is very, very old. In fact, the first depiction of a maze was found as a petroglyph on a stone at Goa in India, dating back four or five thousand years.”

  “Fascinating,” deadpanned the colonel. “And does that help us at the moment?”

  There was the slightest beat before Daniel answered. “Not really, I suppose. Except —” he added hastily, “it suggests that we made the right decision coming this way. Why go to the trouble of constructing something this elaborate unless there’s a purpose to it? In Greek Mythology, King Minos had the famous Cretan Labyrinth built to contain the Minotaur. After killing it, Theseus was only able to escape by means of a single strand of yarn he’d unreeled behind him as he made his way inside of it.”

  “Minotaur?” The colonel again.

  “Yeah, half-man, half-bull. Completely mythical, of course.”

  Sam wasn’t sure but she thought she saw the colonel shudder slightly.

  “Let’s just keep moving, all right? Carter, what does it say?”

  Sam looked down at the scanner, which, like Teal’c’s staff weapon, Daniel’s notebook, and the Colonel’s P90, had somehow made the trip through the doorway with her. She studied the energy signature again. “I’m still getting a reading,” she reported. “We need to work our way in that direction.” She pointed off to the left and a little forward. “About ten o’clock, sir.”

  “Better than a ball of string,” she heard the colonel mutter to himself as he walked by her. Or maybe it wasn’t to himself. There was a slight twist to his mouth, almost a smile, as he said it. She hadn’t seen that in a while.

  “Is there a maze connected with the Hall of the Two Truths in Egyptian mythology?” she asked Daniel as she fell into step behind Colonel O’Neill. Daniel was right behind her, with Teal’c bringing up the rear.

  “Not that I can recall, although it was believed to be surrounded by concentric walls. I suppose, in retrospect, that could be interpreted as a sort of maze.”

  “Here,” called the colonel from up ahead. “How’s this one?”

  He was standing by an opening that led to another walled passageway, indistinguishable from the one they were currently in. “I can see another opening just up ahead,” he reported back after having reconnoitered it for a few seconds. Sam nodded.

  “Looks good, sir.”

  He nodded. “Let’s mark it, Teal’c.”

  Teal’c obligingly activated his staff weapon and aimed two short bursts at the wall, marking the way they’d just come.

  “Better than a ball of string,” she echoed quietly as she walked past the colonel toward the next opening. She wasn’t sure but she thought she heard him chuckle softly.

  They’d been at this for a while now. ‘West’ had brought them, eventually, to a sandstone wall with a lone doorway so low that Teal’c had to duck to pass through. It had led to what was little more than a passageway, open to the sky but narrow and curving, with high walls on either side and no other doorway immediately in sight.

  Sure enough, the same energy signature she’d detected at the gateway with Martouf was here too. Based on her readings, it was straight ahead, through the wall. Concluding that there must be a way to reach it, they picked a direction and began working their way inward. It hadn’t taken long to realize that getting out again would be a nightmare unless they marked their way — which was when Teal’c’s staff weapon had become quite useful.

  Without a weapon of her own, Sam was glad to at least have the device to focus on. It took her mind off the past two days and Martouf. The false Martouf. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen for his story about being rescued from Revanna and implanted with a new symbiote. She should have known it was bogus from the start — which had been her first instinct anyway. But she’d let her guard down, let him play on her guilt over what had happened to the real Martouf. To say she resented some Goa’uld dredging all that up and using it to manipulate her was an understatement. It made her as mad as hell.

  Sam glanced up at the colonel’s back as he scuffed along the path in front of her. He hadn’t said much about his experience with her doppelganger. Teal’c and Daniel weren’t sharing either. If their encounters had been anything like hers, she didn’t blame them. She didn’t exactly want to go into details herself.

  What made her curious, though, was how their captors had managed to pull it off. She’d seen technology, even entities, that could perfectly duplicate someone’s appearance, so that part was easy. Relatively speaking. But the intimate knowledge of her history with Martouf that his replica had demonstrated was frighteningly accurate — almost as if they had been able to harvest not only her memories but also her deepest thoughts and emotions associated with those memories. The Tok’ra Memory Recall Device could access these to some degree, but not independent of the subject’s own consciousness. This had to be something completely different, maybe based on the same theory but far more advanced than anything she’d ever seen or even heard of. The implication of having something that could tap so deeply into someone’s psyche was frightening.

  “Carter?”

  The colonel’s voice snapped her out of her musings. She hadn’t even noticed they’d stopped walking and he was looking at her, impatiently, for directions. Sam quickly refocused on the device in her hand.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said after getting her bearings. “It looks like we’re moving away from it now. We probably needed to go in the other direction.”

  With a dramatic sigh, the colonel made a little spinning gesture with his finger and they all turned around and headed back. It had been this way for a while, playing hot and cold with the energy signature. Sometimes they’d actually come to dead-ends, even though the signal strength would be at its strongest where the passageway was walled up. The first time this happened, Teal’c had simply wanted to blast through, but she and Daniel had argued against it — Daniel, because he felt that they really needed to work through the maze as part of their journey, and she because there was just no way of knowing what ramifications blasting through a wall might have. In the end, the colonel had told Teal’c to save the shot for when they might really need it and they’d reversed course.

  Finally they came to another opening in the wall and at the colonel’s raised eyebrows, Sam rechecked the scanner and nodded. Teal’c marked it with the staff weapon and they entered the next level of the maze.

  This time the scanner showed the signal strongest to the right.

  “You sure?” the colonel asked, skeptically. “Because, you know, you said ‘right’ last time and we still had to make a u-turn.”

  “It’s because the signal is getting stronger, sir. It’s getting harder to differentiate direction the closer we get to the source.”

  “Closer?” He sounded unconvinced. “You mean we’re actually making progress?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Okay then,” he said, matter-of-factly, as if he hadn’t just questioned her ability to read the data in front of her. “Except, I think we’ll go left instead.”

  Or, maybe he did question it. “Sir —”

  “I know what your doohickey says, Carter, but humor me. We’re going left.”

  She shot Daniel a look, but he merely shrugged. Teal’c was already several paces down the path ahead of the colonel.

  Okay, then. Left it was. Sam watched the signal strength weaken with every step they took.

  It was almost down to being barely readable
when they came around a curve in the path and discovered the doorway to the next level. The colonel was smiling smugly.

  “Sir, how did you —?” she began, but her scanner distracted her. The moment she’d passed through the doorway a whole new set of indicators started flashing. “There’s a massive surge of some kind of energy from close by, but it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.”

  “Could it be the one we’ve been following? Maybe we’re just right on top of it?” Daniel asked.

  She shook her head. “No. This is a completely separate signature. And it’s putting out massive amounts of energy.” She stared incredulously at the readings. “I have no idea.”

  “Well then, perhaps just standing here isn’t the wisest choice,” said the colonel. “Let’s keep moving.”

  They went right this time, although Sam wasn’t paying attention to the original signal any more. The new one commanded all her attention. It was slowly, but consistently, growing in strength after the initial spike, like something had been suddenly powered up and now was generating additional energy that it was holding in reserve. Unless it had infinite capacity, as some point it would be forced to release all that energy. Sam could only speculate about what needed that kind of power, and why. A ship, maybe? Although the more likely candidate was some kind of weapon.

  Sam hadn’t noticed they’d reached another doorway until she nearly ran into Teal’c, who had stopped to mark their route. The colonel had once again guessed correctly which direction to take. Apparently he no longer required her help, which was fine. She could give all her attention to the new signal, which had finally slowed in its rate of increase, even if it hadn’t stopped. Although this might not necessarily be good news either. Once it had leveled off, it made sense that whatever it was meant to do, it would start doing it.