Blow stretched the deep blue blanket of the southern Mediterranean and jutting out into the water lay a parched belly of land that held the remains of Kerkouane, an ancient fortress town. To the naked eye it looked like a bomb site. Stumps of columns and leftovers of walls formed an unruly maze. The Romans had dropped by for a visit, about the same time they'd levelled Carthage and rebuilt it to suit their own taste. No rebuilding had ever happened in Kerkouane, which meant that this jumble of ruins was the only major site of genuinely Phoenician origin in all of Tunisia. Most of the excavation had taken place in the 1950s, but some digs were still active, including a recent one, backed by the University of Oxford. Its tents were pitched beyond the far end, a little inland and set back from the main complex.
Outside the largest of these tents stood a sturdy, apple-cheeked, elderly woman. Everyone's favourite granny. The looks distracted from forty-odd years of academic achievement, and from the lofty heights of that experience and its concomitant accolades she glared down at a mousy girl, young enough to be her granddaughter.
"Tophet? Did I hear you say tophet, Miss Matham?" snapped the granny. "And I suppose that afterwards the priests held a jamboree and gnawed the bones. Don't tell me! You've found a wee little femur that smells of incense and has teeth marks on it, right?"
"No, Professor... I just thought -"
"Don't think! You're paid to catalogue. I'm paid to think. That's why they publish what I write, an experience I'm sure you'll never have to deal with."
"Yes, Professor."
Miss Matham, a postgraduate with an appalling tendency to mistake random association for structured thought, shrivelled into a sweat-soaked tank top and fled towards the trenches.
Dr. Siobhan Kelly smiled briefly, entered the tent, and sagged into a canvas folding chair. Forefinger and thumb tweaked the front of her shirt and flapped it in a futile attempt to ventilate her ample bosom. Beastly climate! Grunting, she let go and focused her attention on a decorating table that filled half the tent.
It served as desk, lab counter, and specimen tray, and on it lay a series of six rubbings Matham the Mouse had taken this morning. They showed six different symbols framed by square cartouches, all of roughly the same size. Almost like some kind of hieratic script. But one didn't get to be Head of the Institute of Archaeology by postulating novel writing systems every time one came across something not directly identifiable. So what the dickens were they?
Snatches of conversation drifted into the tent. The chatter and calls of diggers and students could be heard all the time and, like the roar of a waterfall or surf at the beach, she simply tuned them out. Eventually her concentration was broken by the mention of her name.
Miss Matham's dulcet tones answered a query. "Yes, she's in there... But frankly, I wouldn't risk it at the moment. We're in a foul mood."
"We usually are, as I recall. In there, you said?"
American accent. A vaguely familiar voice, straining to drift up from underneath the baggage of decades' worth of names and faces. Before it could rise to the surface, the tent flap swept back to admit a silhouette, black against the noonday brightness outside. Behind it the flap dropped, shutting out the glare and easing the tent's interior back to a diffuse saffron glow.
"Hi, Professor."
"You!"
The hair had undergone some radical pruning, he'd filled out in a way that rather suited him, and something in his face said that he'd encountered real life. Well, he certainly had asked for that, hadn't he? Contrary to all advice.
Dr. Kelly gathered the rubbings, turning them face-down. "There are no vacancies on this dig."
"Nice to see you, too, Professor. I've got a job, thanks."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"I thought I'd stop by for that drink you owe me."
"I owe you what?"
"Remember, last time we met?"
Oh yes. The occasion had been unforgettable. Dr. Siobhan Kelly, then on a scholarly exchange sponsored by the Oxford-Princeton partnership, had been among the first to leave the lecture room that afternoon. And yes, they had arranged to meet for a beer later. She hadn't kept the appointment.
"I don't recall anything of the sort."
"No, I don't suppose you do... Something came up, didn't it?"
Quite. A whole outrageous load of codswallop about the 4' Dynasty and the Giza Pyramids had come up.
"So what do you want?" she snapped.
"I need your professional input." He pulled a fistful of Polaroids from his shirt pocket and held them out to her. "Ever seen this before? I'm thinking it's Tanit."
"Tanit? By your standards that's a bafflingly conservative interpretation!" When Kelly finally looked at the pictures, she bit back a curse. This was impossible. Unless he'd really sunk that low... "Which one of those thieving louts has given this to you? More importantly, where has he hidden it and how much does he want?"
"Your diggers have nothing to do with this. I found it."
She stared at the pictures again. The resolution was barely high enough to bring out detail, but in one of the photos somebody had rigged a yardstick next to the stele. Height and proportions matched exactly. "Where?"
"I'm sorry, Professor. Need to know."
Need to what?
The cheek of this plonker was incredible. "Let me show you something, Jackson. And then, if you'd still prefer keeping it to yourself, we'll call the police."
Kelly stormed from the tent, nearly tripping over that wretched girl, Matham, and leaving Daniel Jackson to follow.
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!"
&n
bsp; 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 f
rom 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."
Heaving a sigh of relief, Sam Carter tossed the garments in question at a bewildered SF and joined her team mates. Kelly meanwhile had spotted Dr. Jackson.
"I was led to believe we were going to New Mexico to pick up my stele!"
"I never -"
"Listen, Jackson, if I spend a minute longer in this concrete mausoleum, I'll -"
"General, how about we just get this show on the road?" Jack eyed the Professor like an arachnophobe would regard a tarantula. "Before she starts dismantling the place?"
"I beg your pardon?" Kelly spun around. "Who are
She was cut off by a sudden clank. Sergeant Davis up in the control room must have interpreted the Colonel's enquiry as an order. Or maybe he had decided that this was the easiest method of curing a chronic earache. Either way, the ponderous noise of the Stargate spinning to life finally directed Professor Kelly's attention to the most prominent item in the room.
Slack-jawed with astonishment and blessedly quiet, she took a few steps toward the ramp. On the `gate the first symbol engaged, the chevron snapping into place.
Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 Page 2