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crossoverficThis is my entry for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
multific finishathon. Done at last!
Title: Eclipse
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Fandoms: Stargate SG-1, Pitch Black
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: SG-1 early Season 7; Scenery from "Pitch Black" (2000).
Summary: 14,000 words. The team steps through the Gate onto a world with three suns. It does not go well.
Notes: Part one of two. The link to the next part is at the bottom of this post.
"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!"
- John Milton, Samson Agonistes
Prologue
Sam shifted in her chair, mentally cursing the Colonel for not coming with her to this meeting. Paperwork? Right. He just didn't want to paste on a supportive smile and try to act interested in a science mission, even if it had been his idea in the first place. Lately, whenever they got a break from military-themed missions or end-of-the-world scenarios they'd been doing all the Daniel-esque archaeological surveys they'd avoided the year he was gone. It was her turn for a working vacation, Jack had said. Now she just had to sell the General on it.
"Sir, I'm aware that PM3-44G is not on the priority list for future missions. The initial MALP data indicated an extremely dry environment, with a very long planetary day and no signs of either past occupation or unusual mineral deposits. However, further examination of the data has revealed some interesting anomalies."
The general glanced back down at the report folder in his hands, lips pursed, then raised his eyebrows at her. "If you are referring to the multiple suns, Major, may I remind you that this is not the first time we have encountered that phenomenon?"
Sam winced. She hardly needed reminding; she had been on the SG team on the mission in question. There had not been enough time to send a MALP through for the customary extended survey before the team had Gated through, and they had been unaware that P9Q-281 had possessed two suns. They had been stranded on the planet by a malfunctioning DHD, and had nearly died of the heat before Jack, affected by a mental download from an Ancient device, had miraculously managed to come up with repair instructions.
"I'm aware of that, sir," she said, "but this system is different. The surface of the planet is very warm, but not enough to endanger human life, as long as we bring plenty of water. There are three suns, not two, and they appear to be aligned in such a way that the environment maintains an almost steady temperature; the MALP detected a variance of only ten degrees Fahrenheit during the entire 48 hours it was there, and the planet went through at least one full rotation in that time frame. I would need to do a more in-depth study of the planetary alignments in the system to be sure, but it looks as though PM3-44G never experiences true nightfall; at most, there might be an hour or so of semi-twilight while all three of the suns are at or near the horizon."
"I take it this is highly unusual?" Hammond asked, his expression slowly shifting from mild disapproval toward indulgent interest.
"Very much so, sir," Sam confirmed, nodding slightly, eyes wide. "The odds of a stable system like this forming naturally are quite small. I would, of course, be unable to do much direct observation due to the solar glare, but I think a UAV with a special electronics package could provide some of the data I'd need to confirm my hypothesis. Also, there was enough organic material in the samples to suggest that there is carbon-based life on the planet somewhere, or was, at some point; I'd like the chance to explore that."
She took a deep breath; time to hit some selling points. No matter how much the General liked his flagship team, he would need some sort of justification to note in the files. "Further, it seems likely that the third sun, the smallest, was once a gas giant like our Jupiter. If that is the case, and PM3-44G was a more hospitable planet at some point in the past, then Daniel might have a chance at finding some evidence of civilization. There had to have been a reason for the Ancients to put a Gate there, after all. If not, then our investigation might still be able to shed some light on the type of life-forms that might flourish in other extremely dry environments a little closer to home. Mars, for example. If NASA is serious about eventually colonizing the planet, they'll need to do more than just thicken up the atmosphere. The soil there is extremely sterile, and there is very little water available, so any organism that could be introduced without requiring extensive imports from Earth would be extremely valuable."
"Breathe, Major," the General said, chuckling quietly, and closed the report folder. "All right, you've convinced me. I'll put PM3-44G into the schedule for next week. Now go on; you haven't left the base before me one day this week."
"Ah, yes sir. Thank you, sir." Sam grinned at him, a little embarrassed but exultant at having won her point. Science-oriented or not, this was going to be a mission for the record books; she could feel it in her bones.
Act One: Exploration
The first touch of air on Sam's face after stepping through the Stargate always felt warm to her, due to the chilling effect of wormhole travel. She'd gotten used to it over the years. Her first breath on PM3-44G, however, made her feel like a new recruit all over again; it was like a blast from a furnace, and she gasped reflexively in response.
The wormhole slurped behind her, disgorging the rest of her team, and she stepped automatically away, raising a hand to shade her face from the incredible glare reflecting from every surface in sight. The single, smallest sun was overhead at the moment, and its bright, bluish light made her squint even through the Air Force-issue sunglasses she wore. The Gate sat upon on a small hill surrounded by a rolling plain of sandy, rocky terrain, with the suggestion of a canyon a short distance away. Further details were obscured by the haze of heat waves rising from the ground.
"Wow." The Colonel stepped past her, boots crunching in the dry soil underfoot. "Note to self: when Carter's report says 'very warm', what she really means is 'blazing hot'."
"Oh, it's not that bad," Daniel replied off-handedly, walking past them to check the DHD. "We've got water, and plenty of sun-block; it's not like we're planning on spending several days here." He stripped off his uniform jacket as he spoke, and Sam could see patches of sweat already beginning to darken the fabric of the T-shirt beneath his arms.
"Of course it feels like home to you," Jack muttered, irritably. "But some of us aren't all that fond of deserts."
"At least there are no trees, O'Neill."
Sam threw a quick grin in Teal'c's direction. Of the four of them, he appeared least affected by the heat; he'd even turned down sunglasses, claiming to have lived and fought in climates worse than this while in Apophis' service. She received only a raised eyebrow in response to her smile, but after seven years of serving with the taciturn Jaffa she'd learned to see the subtleties in his expressions. A twinkle in his eye and a twitch at the corner of his mouth gave away his amusement.
"Very funny, Teal'c." Jack turned to Sam with a carefully bland expression, and gestured toward the foot of the hill with the P-90 clasped in his arms. "So which way do we go, Carter? This is your party."
Sam schooled her face back into 'mission mode' and pointed in the direction of the narrow canyon. "That way, sir. The initial MALP readings picked up mostly cinder, gypsum, and evaporite deposits; I think a lot of this area might once have been covered with water. If there was a living culture here at one time, it seems likely that they would have moved into more sheltered areas, like that canyon, to protect themselves from the growing heat ..."
"... And regardless, any evidence washed into the canyon by receding waters would be more likely to have remained unburied than anything out here in the open," Daniel interrupted, completing the thought. "In fact, I'm surprised the Gate is still exposed; any open water here must have dried up thousands, even millions of years ago. The dust storms must be fierce." He had tied his jacket around his waist, and was now staring out at the horizon, examining the bank of dirty cloud that hugged the ground in the direction that the blue sun would have risen from.
"Think someone still visits here? Often enough to keep the Gate from getting buried?" Jack perked up at that suggestion.
"The MALP found no evidence to suggest that," Sam objected, then looked down to check her watch. "The specialized UAV I requested will be sent through in another fifteen minutes, though; I'll make sure it gets some shots of the ground while it's up. If it finds any evidence of Goa'uld or other activity, we'll know in a couple of hours."
"All right then," Jack nodded. "Let's get a move on, people. We're burning daylight."
"Uh, Jack? You do remember that there is no night on this planet?" Daniel spoke up, quirking a smile in the Colonel's direction.
"Figure of speech," Jack said in a put-upon voice, and started down the hill.
Sam suppressed a smile and moved to follow.
------------------------------------------------------
The team covered the distance to the canyon quickly, and without incident. They saw no evidence of any kind along the route to hint at previous Goa'uld or other civilized activity on the planet, but Sam's suspicions of organic life were proved true; as they drew closer to the narrow passage, they began discovering small bones and bone fragments scattered amongst the loose stones at their feet.
Sam called a halt a couple of hundred yards from their goal to take a few samples of the bone for testing, and a few more from the rocky soil around them to examine for trace elements when they returned to the base. If Daniel's theory about the dust storms was correct and the planet did still receive visitors, there would have to be a reason; perhaps the MALP readings had been incomplete. She planned to take more samples from the canyon floor as well, and from the strange, protruding earth formations that the MALP's telescoping cameras had detected nearby. She had a couple of theories about how they might be formed, and was eager to see which was correct.
"I think that's enough for now," she said, tucking the last bone sample away in her kit in a protective plastic baggie. "The bone fragments are too small to tell what the animal or animals they belonged to might have looked like, but they were almost certainly warm-blooded vertebrates of some kind, and definitely lived here after the planet's transformation into a desert. There must still be water available, somewhere."
The Colonel sighed and tugged the ball cap from his head, then ran a hand through his sweaty, graying hair. "Did we take a wrong turn into some kind of alternate universe where you're the archaeologist, Carter? I thought you picked this planet because of the unusual stellar arrangement, or something."
"Oh, I did, sir." Sam checked her watch again, then squinted up at the sky. "In fact ... there goes the UAV now." The tiny automated aircraft soared by overhead, special sensor packages and cameras recording information for later assessment. "I can't make any direct observations of the stellar geography of the system, for obvious reasons; I'll have to analyze the data from the UAV when I get back. But that wasn't my only reason for coming."
Jack grunted and put the cap back on. "Carbon-based life in extremely dry environments, Martian studies, yadda yadda," he said, grudgingly. "I read your pre-mission report. I dunno. I just thought we'd get to do something a little more interesting if I put you in charge of picking our next destination - like the time we went to Cassie's planet to observe that black hole eclipse."
"That, of course, being the mission where we lost SG-7 and found out about Nirrti," Daniel put in, dryly. "I should hope this mission would be a little less interesting than that one." He had dropped into a crouch a few paces nearer the canyon than Jack's position, picking over the debris at his feet, with Teal'c looming at his back like a portable shade-generator.
"Indeed," Teal'c commented, raising his eyebrows at the Colonel.
"You know what I mean," Jack groused.
"Don't relax too soon," Daniel added, in an absent tone of voice, as he picked up a larger bone fragment and turned it over in his had. "There are tooth marks all over these bone fragments - deep gouges, and the way they're spaced, they probably came from a pretty large predator. I wouldn't want to meet up with the owner of those teeth unexpectedly."
"Not the kind of excitement I was looking for, Daniel, but thanks for trying," Jack sighed, and glanced back at Sam. "Let's get a move on, then. We'll take a water break at the canyon, re-apply sun-block, and decide where to go from there."
Daniel dropped the bone he was holding and stood, dusting his hands off on the thighs of his uniform pants. "Really, though, I don't think we have much to worry about," he continued. "The dry climate preserves things pretty well, but I'd guess the bones are at least a couple of decades old. If there were a population of these things in the area, I'm sure we'd see more recent spoor."
"That's good to know," Sam said, wiping droplets of sweat out of her eyes as she headed toward the canyon again. The glare had dimmed a bit as the blue sun dipped toward the horizon, but she knew that wouldn't last much longer; the paired red and amber suns would be rising in another hour. The lower oxygen content of the air was beginning to get to her, too; it felt as though she'd been jogging on a treadmill for half an hour, rather than walking. It was better than it could have been, though. After living at more than a mile of altitude in Colorado for the last several years, the team had become acclimatized to relatively thin air.
More details of the narrow gap became visible as they approached it. The cliffs on either side, though steep, were not particularly high - even now, there was not much shadow at the bottom. As the mirage effect of the heat haze dissipated due to lack of distance, however, something else became visible on the canyon floor. The vague whitish blurs that Sam had at first taken to be more highly reflective stone surfaces or perhaps a lighter-colored mineral resolved into something else entirely.
"Wow." Jack whistled softly at the sight. "Got your digital camera with you, Daniel?"
"The predators on this planet must be formidable indeed," Teal'c commented.
Portions of an enormous skeleton were wedged into the space between the cliffs, bones larger than anything Sam had ever seen outside of a museum. The canyon curved a little further in, but just before that point she could see a column of huge vertebrae suspended horizontally a dozen feet off the ground by the arching vault of an enormous ribcage, a macabre tunnel they'd have to walk through if they decided to explore the area further. Other bones littered the narrow space like giant-sized jack straws dropped by a clumsy hand.
"I don't ... I'm not sure, I'll have to take a closer look, but I don't think all of these bones are from land-based creatures," Daniel said calmly, lifting his digital camera to take a few shots. "The larger ones appear considerably more weathered than the fragments we found out there, and they're more protected here, too; they could have been here a very long time. I think they might - from the types of bones I'm seeing, I think they might be from sea-going creatures, wedged here when the water evaporated."
"Like whales?" Sam blurted. "Wow. That's the last thing I expected to find in this place, even if my theory about the third sun proved to be true."
"Well, consider it proven," the Colonel said, gesturing at the boneyard before them. "Shall we take a closer look?"
Act Two: Investigation
The team paused for a water break, then continued up the narrow canyon, documenting the immense skeletal remains and geological features with the digital camera as they walked. The walls of the canyon were made of the same rocky, light-colored earth as the plain they'd crossed and the low hills nearby; nothing aside from the bones seemed especially unique or out of place, but it was hard to tell sometimes what would turn out to be important at first glance. Even if nothing jumped out at them while they were here, it was entirely possible a fresh set of eyes in the scientific department might discover something in the photographs later.
To Sam, the walk felt almost like a tour through a natural history exhibit, one dedicated to the extinction of Earth's dinosaurs. She paused for a moment beneath the arching vault of the vast ribcage that spanned the canyon and gazed upward at the massive vertebrae suspended several feet over her head, mentally estimating the size of the creature they had originally come from. She felt very small in comparison, in a way she'd never felt when faced with enormous astronomical bodies like supernovae or black holes; there was something immediate and vast about these biological ruins that set off instictive warning signals in the back of her mind, as though the unstoppable machine of Entropy was poised on the brink of swallowing her whole.
She shivered a little despite the intense heat, then glanced around at her companions. Next to her, the Colonel had turned to look over his shoulder back the way they'd come. His brow furrowed a little as he studied the curvature of the canyon, which would conceal their point of entry entirely if they proceeded much further, and he glanced down at something clasped in his hand with a concerned grunt.
"We'd better not get turned around in here," Jack said, tilting the object-- a compass-- in Sam's direction.
Sam squinted through the glare reflecting from the compass' face and caught a glimpse of the needle spinning wildly around, refusing to settle on any one point. She grimaced, then reached up to swipe a fresh trail of sweat out of her eyes. "As strong as the magnetic field is, it'll probably also interfere with our radios over any significant distance. I doubt we'll be able to hear anything more than static when the SGC dials in for our checkup a couple of hours from now."
"Shades of P3X-403," Daniel mused aloud, two paces behind them, staring up one side of the canyon at an earthen spire rising to a point several feet above the rim. His hair had already begun to escape from the tan-colored bandana he'd chosen to wear today, sticking out around the edges in sweat-dampened spikes. "It might be a good idea to go ahead and check out some of these earth formations you were interested in, then head back. If the UAV images show anything important, we can always come back with better equipment."
Sam nodded, remembering what she'd heard about the problems the SGC mining teams on the Unas-settled world had faced when trying to find one of their number who had gone missing. She would be a little disappointed to head back early, but on a mission like this one where no lives were on the line, it was better to be safe than sorry. "It looks like the canyon flattens out a little up ahead, we can climb up more easily there. It shouldn't take very long to test my theory about what caused them and take a few samples."
"You spoke of multiple theories prior to our arrival on this planet," Teal'c observed calmly from his place next to Daniel. "What have you observed here to change your mind?"
Sam smiled at him, pleased at his perceptiveness and interest. "From the MALP pictures, it was impossible to tell whether the spires were formed from softer, packed earth, as we can now see they are, or rock, like the formations commonly called hoodoos back on Earth, which might have contained useful minerals. In the latter case, they would have been revealed by the passage of time, as wind and other natural events wore away the material around them. As it is, however, I'd guess there must have been something other than the elements involved in building them."
"Mound-building insects, maybe? Like Macrotermes termites?" Daniel asked, wrinkling his nose. He'd flipped his clip-on sun-glasses up for a better look, and his blue eyes almost seemed to glow in the light of the alien sun. "I've never heard of them living in an environment as extreme as this, but there's always a first time for everything, I suppose."
"Maybe not insects," Sam replied, "but I'm fairly certain some kind of lifeform was involved. The shape and composition of the columns is inconsistent with wind formation, and I can't think of another environmental process that could possibly have created them given the harshness of the environment." She wasn't sure what kind of lifeform it had been-- bacteria binding them together, something larger physically shaping them? Was something hidden beneath the spires?-- but she wanted to find out.
"Well, we won't find out standing here yakking about it," Jack groused. He removed his ball cap again, ruffling his damp hair to dry it a little, then settled the cap back on his head and made an elaborate 'after you' arm gesture in Sam's direction. "Get to it, Carter."
"Yes sir," Sam replied. She exchanged amused glances with Daniel, then took point again, heading toward the lowest visible section of the canyon's now-sloping walls.
The blue sun had begun to set, flickering at one edge of the horizon, and a golden-red glow lit the sky afire at the other. Shadows pooled strangely in and around the giant bones at the canyon's floor as the vaguely underwater hues that had previously characterized the landscape grew progressively warmer. Sam kept an eye on one of the spires as she walked, and was puzzled to see that a dark patch she'd noticed at the top didn't move at all in the shifting light; she'd assumed it was a shadow before, but that clearly wasn't the case. It almost looked as though the spire were hollow... but what could have caused it?
The narrow canyon opened out slowly as the walls dropped, then widened suddenly as the team turned a corner, joining a vast, shallow valley crowded with more of the titanic skeletons. The sight struck Sam speechless for a moment; it looked like nothing so much as a killing ground, or perhaps an elephant's graveyard. More of the skeletons were complete here than had been in the canyon, and they varied more widely in size; the rib bones of one particularly large specimen jutted up against the horizon in a grotesque parody of trees, with tatters of lichen at the tips providing a semblance of leaves and branches.
The sight reminded Sam just how hot and thirsty she was. She called another quick rest break, making sure to dampen her collar and the sleeves of her uniform shirt for a little extra relief once she'd swallowed a few mouthfuls of lukewarm water. Daniel's lips were beginning to crack in the dry heat, so she shared her SPF 30 lip gel with him; he'd brought his own, but he'd forgotten to remove the chocolate bar he habitually carried from that pocket of his vest, and his tube of gel was completely embedded in the resulting sticky goo.
Finally, the team approached a small grouping of the spires. She could see another, much larger cluster of them in the distance, rising up from a swell of ground like the spines of a hedgehog; it almost made her wish she'd brought along one of the ground-penetrating radar scanners the SGC kept on hand for sizable geological and archaeological surveys.
Sam tapped the side of one of the spires with the heel of one hand and found her suspicions confirmed. "It's hollow," she said, marvelling, and unslung her kit to retrieve the small rock hammer she'd brought with an eye to securing possible mineral samples.
"That seems... unlikely," Daniel commented, a thoughtful expression on his face.
"Well, it sure doesn't look like something you'd find in Vancouver or Egypt," Jack replied with a shrug, rapping a second column with his knuckles. "I've always wondered why we don't come across more seriously alien landscapes out here. Is the galaxy really that boring?"
Daniel opened his mouth, looking a little indignant, then shook his head and shut it again; he'd had this argument with Jack several times before. Sam grinned at the pair, still enjoying the renewal of their familiar banter after so many months without it, then stepped past them with the rock hammer and struck firmly against the wall of the first spire. Small chips of packed earth came away under the head; after a moment, a section gave way entirely, creating a small hole into the interior of the column.
She took a moment to secure a few of the earth fragments she'd removed for later study; the flakes had a texture reminiscent of dried mud, a distinct oddity on a planet whose intermittent cloudcover was all dust and no moisture. While she was packing them away, the Colonel stepped forward with a flashlight in hand, shining it into the opening she'd made.
"Nothing in here," he said, tilting the light first upward, then down. "It's like the inside of a chimney. Big hole at the top, hollow all the way down. Can't see the bottom, though; looks like it opens out into a cave."
"I wonder if they're all like that?" Daniel mused, looking over at the larger, distant complex of spires that Sam had noticed earlier.
"Let's find out," Sam suggested, picking up the hammer again and moving to strike the column Jack had tested with his hand. The wall was a little thicker on this one, but was no more difficult to pierce than the other, and soon she was peering into the interior of another empty earthen tube. This spire was angled more toward suns-rise than the other had been, however; she could see a small area of the cavern floor beneath, spotlit by the suns' red-gold rays.
"I don't suppose there's any easy way to get down there," she said dubiously, more curious than ever about the origin and purpose of the earthen formations. She'd never seen anything quite like them before.
Jack shook his head. "I didn't see any cave mouths on our way here, and without climbing gear I'd rather not try to shimmy down one of these things."
And of course they had to be concerned about the possibility of predators, too, Sam thought. Maybe whatever had chewed up those bones out by the Stargate had moved on a long time ago, and maybe it didn't lair underground, but there was no way to be sure without going down there, and the chimney-like entrances would make it difficult for them to escape in a hurry if they needed to.
Daniel frowned and began digging in his own pack. "Wait a minute, I have an idea..."
Jack frowned at him. "If this idea of yours involves you going down there alone..."
"No, no..." Daniel cut him off. "I'm just looking for... ah, there it is." He raised one hand, revealing a spare digital video recorder he'd probably been carrying 'just in case'. "Do you still carry duct tape, Sam?"
"Never leave home without it," she assured him. She retrieved the roll for him, then watched with an intrigued expression as he secured the video recorder to the end of a coil of rope from the Colonel's supplies with a series of knots and expertly applied squares of tough, shiny silver tape. The camera didn't have a light of its own, so he incorporated a flashlight into the assembly too, aimed forward of the lens and fixed into the 'on' position.
"MALP on a rope," Jack commented, grinning as he examined Daniel's completed handiwork. "Sweet."
"You'll have to widen the hole a little," Daniel replied, nodding, as he wound the coil of rope around his arm. "I'll pass the camera through and lower it down into the cavern, then let it spin around a little to get a good look at all the walls before pulling it back up."
"Good idea, Daniel," Sam agreed, and picked up the rock hammer again to widen one of the holes.
Teal'c stepped forward, shaking his head, before she could do so. "Allow me, Major Carter," he said, then raised the butt end of his staff weapon from the ground and used it to strike repeatedly at the nearest column. The dirt crumbled easily at the blows, flaking away and falling into the widening hole to rain down on whatever lay inside.
"Thanks, Teal'c." Daniel pressed the button to turn the video recorder on, then began slowly lowering it through the opening.
Act Three: Discovery
Time seemed to crawl as Daniel lowered the camera slowly into the interior of the hollow earthen spire. The paired suns marched slowly up into the sky, scorching down on the stark, barren landscape around the team, and Sam could feel every individual drop of sweat that trickled down the damp skin of her back and between her breasts. It was a good thing the SGC never issued T-shirts in white.
Teal'c and the Colonel were alternately watching Daniel's progress and the landscape around the spires, keeping an eye out for trouble. Though there didn't seem to be any threat worth noting on the dead, arid surface of the planet, they had been fooled before. The tips of Jack's ears were beginning to redden a little under the onslaught of the suns' rays; Teal'c's scalp was covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and the gold symbol on his forehead was a blaze of reflected light. Sam felt the skin of her own face tightening a little despite the industrial strength sunscreen she'd slathered on, and promised herself a long soak and a moisturizing facial when she got home.
"That should do it," Daniel finally announced. He had leaned forward slightly, glancing down through the opening to watch the progress of the camera as it descended into the cavern. "Going to spin it a little more, and..." His voice trailed off, and he frowned. "What was that?"
Jack perked up, turning away from the scenery to fix all his attention on Daniel. "What was what?"
"I thought I heard... Whoa! I think there's something down there..."
"Daniel? What are you seeing?" Sam asked, both alarmed and curious at this new development.
"What's down there, Daniel?" Jack said again, trying to capture the archaeologist's attention.
Daniel fliched, then took an abrupt step backward, and this time Sam heard whatever he'd been hearing, too; faint high-pitched echoes, something like sonar but distinctly organic in origin. "I don't know, but whatever it is, it doesn't seem to like the flashlight," he said distractedly, and began pulling the rope up as quickly as he could.
He wasn't quick enough. A few seconds later, the rope abruptly jerked out of Daniel's hands, then stopped again; he'd wound the surplus around his right arm so as not to let it slip accidentally, and it caught there, pulling him off-balance with sudden force and dragging him toward the hole.
"Hey, ow!" he exclaimed, digging in his feet, but he failed to gain any traction in the loose, rocky dirt.
"Daniel!" Sam lunged for her friend, but she wasn't close enough to get a grip on him before he was yanked into the column; the Colonel was closer, but the handful of T-shirt he managed to get hold of was torn right out of his grip. Daniel's right arm was dragged into the hole, then his entire upper body as something continued to pull sharply on the other end of the rope.
"Daniel Jackson!" Teal'c grabbed for him this time, gathering handfuls of the material of Daniel's BDU pants and pulling backward with all his might. Jack managed to get a grip on him, too, on his second try, wrapping his fingers around Daniel's belt as Teal'c pulled him slowly back out of the hole. Sam fumbled for her combat knife, then darted forward as soon as Daniel's entangled arm emerged from the column. The rope parted easily under the sharp blade, releasing Daniel to collapse onto the ground with a pained grunt.
"So much for the camera," he said, panting, as he fumbled at what was left of the rope with his free hand.
"Let me get that, Daniel." Sam resheathed her knife and knelt next to him, unwrapping the length of rope where it had tightened around his arm. "Forget about the camera, you're lucky it didn't break your arm. Are you all right? What was that?"
"I don't know." He flexed his wrist and elbow a little once the last of the rope was removed, and grimaced in pain. "I couldn't really see much, just movement in the shadows as the flashlight swivelled around. Then something lunged at it-- it had a wide head and a long tail, but it moved too quick to see much in the way of details. I think there were several of them, but only that one came anywhere near the light, so it was hard to tell."
Jack snorted and reached down for Daniel's uninjured arm, pulling the archaeologist back to his feet. "Must have been pretty big to pull you off your feet like that. Think we found that large predator you were talking about?"
"Possibly," Daniel said, distractedly, still flexing his arm. Bruises were already starting to form, dark and angry-looking under the skin. "Like I said, I couldn't see much, and they moved very, very fast. I'm sure the camera got at least one good shot, but--"
"Well, we're not trying that again," Jack interrupted him. "Doesn't matter what's down there, whatever it is, is dangerous. It probably can't climb up after you, but I'd rather not take the risk."
Sam glanced at the suns again, a quarter of the way across the sky, then down at her watch, and nodded. "The UAV should be on its way back by now, and the SGC will be dialing in for a check-up any minute."
"Good," Jack grunted. "Let's get moving. I'd rather not wait around to find out if there are any more of those things around here." He picked up Daniel's pack, ignoring the younger man's protests, and shook his head. "Figures you would kick over a nest of womp rats, Daniel; 'bout all that's missing from this re-enactment of Tatooine now, is an old guy in a dress."
Daniel snorted, but his expression had lightened. "Careful what you wish for, Jack. I can think of a few system lords out there still who fit that description."
"Indeed," Teal'c agreed, one eyebrow raised and a barely-there smirk signalling his amusement.
Sam choked at the mental image of Ba'al or Anubis playing Obi-Wan Kenobi to Daniel's Luke Skywalker. No-- more like Emperor Palpatine to Daniel's Anakin, given the general Goa'uld attitude. And wouldn't that be a disaster! A Goa'ulded Daniel was way, way up there on the list of things Sam hoped she never lived to see.
Jack looked faintly pleased with himself for his tension-breaking joke, but it didn't impair his alertness any as he took point, leading the team back toward the canyon. Sam shook her head and fell into third, the smile slipping from her face as she watched Daniel trying not to limp in front of her. The only injuries immediately visible from his close encounter were the bruises on his arm, but he'd hit the dirt column with enough force that he was probably bruised from armpit to thigh under his uniform, not to mention how badly the torque must have wrenched his shoulder. Janet would not be happy with him when they got back.
The boneyard seemed even more like a killing ground to Sam as they passed back through it on their journey back toward the Gate. It was still possible that the creatures Daniel had just caught a glimpse of were merely an essentially harmless transient population reacting defensively to their intrusion, but somehow she doubted that. SG-1's luck had always run perpendicular to the easy route. Daniel could find one artifact and use it to correctly predict a tribe of Unas in the hills; surely, it was no coincidence that he'd nearly fallen into a nest of large, unnaturally swift animals shortly after pointing out carnivorous tooth-marks on a handful of splintered bone.
Teal'c covered every solitary spire atop the canyon's walls with his staff weapon as they walked, and the Colonel was paying even more attention to the walls than he had before, as though looking for any sign of an additional entrance to the underground caverns. Sam could feel the effects of their alertness on her own attitude, as the hair stood up on the back of her neck and refused to lie back down. Just once, she would have liked to participate in a mission that went off without a hitch; as it was, she couldn't shake the feeling that the trouble wasn't over yet.
They stopped once more before making the final push to the Stargate, just inside the mouth of the canyon where they'd first gotten a look at the whale-sized skeletons. It was pretty clear by that time they weren't going to be chased back to the SGC, for which small grace Sam was quite thankful. Even better: the whine of the UAV overhead was a welcome reminder that the primary objective of the mission was still within her reach.
Sam smiled a little as she turned her head up to follow the sound, shading her eyes with one hand as the little automated airplane flew through the glare of the paired suns. In half an hour, it and she would both be back through the Gate, and a wealth of data on this implausible solar system's structure would be hers to decipher. She enjoyed her job as team-second on SG-1 very much, but scientific mysteries like this one were the icing on a very tasty cake.
She jumped a little, startled, as another sound interrupted the UAV's familiar buzz, and gazed across the rocky plain to see the second chevron locking into place on the Gate. They'd obviously missed the time set for their first check-up, but standard procedure would have the SGC dialing in at regular intervals afterward, and this activation didn't fit that pattern. She checked her watch again to be sure, then exchanged alarmed glances with the Colonel and moved backward without being told into what little cover there was behind a large rock propped against one of the canyon's walls.
Daniel snugged in behind her, and Teal'c and Jack found their own cover behind convenient skeletal fragments on the opposite side of the canyon. Sam wriggled her fingers and toes as they waited, adding up all the times they'd been trapped like this within sight of the Gate, mere minutes before they would have escaped. On a world with a slave population or valuable resources, however, that was a risk that could be planned for; she was even more baffled at the idea of a Goa'uld visiting this barren place than she had initially been at the idea of the Ancients building a Gate here to begin with. Maybe it was the SGC after all; the obvious alternative-- someone leaking SG-1's itinerary to their enemies-- was a sour weight in her stomach.
The rest of the chevrons lit in quick order, and the horizontal flush of an establishing wormhole quickly settled back into a pool of shimmering blue. Sam fumbled in her vest pockets for her binoculars, and saw the Colonel out of the corner of her eye doing the same as they waited to find out who their visitors were. After a moment's pause, a pair of Jaffa with unfamiliar insignia on their foreheads stepped through the Gate.
Jack groaned audibly. "For crying out loud. You recognize that symbol, big guy?"
Teal'c rumbled an affirmative. "It is an ostrich feather, the mark of a minor Goa'uld called Shu."
"Shoo?" Jack's eyebrows shot up at the name. "As in, 'shoo, go away?'"
"No, as in Shu, the Egyptian god of the atmosphere and of dry winds," Daniel muttered in Sam's ear. "Also a personification of the sun's light-- rather appropriate, considering. According to mythology, he's one of the sons of Ra."
"Probably not a fan of ours, then," Sam joked half-heartedly, watching as several more Jaffa stepped through the wormhole. Several pair after the first two Jaffa carried-- or dragged-- another figure with them, and all bore staff weapons.
The Jaffa were still coming through when one of them abruptly looked up in the direction of the UAV's flight path, and Sam cursed silently, realizing what was about to happen. So much for my research, she thought dispiritedly as a blast from the Jaffa's staff lashed out and knocked the unmanned plane into a tight, descending spiral.
The other Jaffa dropped their charges in a heap before the Gate and fanned out, forming an alert, protective perimeter as the last of their companions finished Gating in. All told, there were some two dozen Jaffa and half a dozen prizoners present when the wormhole finally winked out.
>> Part Two >>
~
multific finishathon. Done at last!Title: Eclipse
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Fandoms: Stargate SG-1, Pitch Black
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: SG-1 early Season 7; Scenery from "Pitch Black" (2000).
Summary: 14,000 words. The team steps through the Gate onto a world with three suns. It does not go well.
Notes: Part one of two. The link to the next part is at the bottom of this post.
"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!"
- John Milton, Samson Agonistes
Prologue
Sam shifted in her chair, mentally cursing the Colonel for not coming with her to this meeting. Paperwork? Right. He just didn't want to paste on a supportive smile and try to act interested in a science mission, even if it had been his idea in the first place. Lately, whenever they got a break from military-themed missions or end-of-the-world scenarios they'd been doing all the Daniel-esque archaeological surveys they'd avoided the year he was gone. It was her turn for a working vacation, Jack had said. Now she just had to sell the General on it.
"Sir, I'm aware that PM3-44G is not on the priority list for future missions. The initial MALP data indicated an extremely dry environment, with a very long planetary day and no signs of either past occupation or unusual mineral deposits. However, further examination of the data has revealed some interesting anomalies."
The general glanced back down at the report folder in his hands, lips pursed, then raised his eyebrows at her. "If you are referring to the multiple suns, Major, may I remind you that this is not the first time we have encountered that phenomenon?"
Sam winced. She hardly needed reminding; she had been on the SG team on the mission in question. There had not been enough time to send a MALP through for the customary extended survey before the team had Gated through, and they had been unaware that P9Q-281 had possessed two suns. They had been stranded on the planet by a malfunctioning DHD, and had nearly died of the heat before Jack, affected by a mental download from an Ancient device, had miraculously managed to come up with repair instructions.
"I'm aware of that, sir," she said, "but this system is different. The surface of the planet is very warm, but not enough to endanger human life, as long as we bring plenty of water. There are three suns, not two, and they appear to be aligned in such a way that the environment maintains an almost steady temperature; the MALP detected a variance of only ten degrees Fahrenheit during the entire 48 hours it was there, and the planet went through at least one full rotation in that time frame. I would need to do a more in-depth study of the planetary alignments in the system to be sure, but it looks as though PM3-44G never experiences true nightfall; at most, there might be an hour or so of semi-twilight while all three of the suns are at or near the horizon."
"I take it this is highly unusual?" Hammond asked, his expression slowly shifting from mild disapproval toward indulgent interest.
"Very much so, sir," Sam confirmed, nodding slightly, eyes wide. "The odds of a stable system like this forming naturally are quite small. I would, of course, be unable to do much direct observation due to the solar glare, but I think a UAV with a special electronics package could provide some of the data I'd need to confirm my hypothesis. Also, there was enough organic material in the samples to suggest that there is carbon-based life on the planet somewhere, or was, at some point; I'd like the chance to explore that."
She took a deep breath; time to hit some selling points. No matter how much the General liked his flagship team, he would need some sort of justification to note in the files. "Further, it seems likely that the third sun, the smallest, was once a gas giant like our Jupiter. If that is the case, and PM3-44G was a more hospitable planet at some point in the past, then Daniel might have a chance at finding some evidence of civilization. There had to have been a reason for the Ancients to put a Gate there, after all. If not, then our investigation might still be able to shed some light on the type of life-forms that might flourish in other extremely dry environments a little closer to home. Mars, for example. If NASA is serious about eventually colonizing the planet, they'll need to do more than just thicken up the atmosphere. The soil there is extremely sterile, and there is very little water available, so any organism that could be introduced without requiring extensive imports from Earth would be extremely valuable."
"Breathe, Major," the General said, chuckling quietly, and closed the report folder. "All right, you've convinced me. I'll put PM3-44G into the schedule for next week. Now go on; you haven't left the base before me one day this week."
"Ah, yes sir. Thank you, sir." Sam grinned at him, a little embarrassed but exultant at having won her point. Science-oriented or not, this was going to be a mission for the record books; she could feel it in her bones.
Act One: Exploration
The first touch of air on Sam's face after stepping through the Stargate always felt warm to her, due to the chilling effect of wormhole travel. She'd gotten used to it over the years. Her first breath on PM3-44G, however, made her feel like a new recruit all over again; it was like a blast from a furnace, and she gasped reflexively in response.
The wormhole slurped behind her, disgorging the rest of her team, and she stepped automatically away, raising a hand to shade her face from the incredible glare reflecting from every surface in sight. The single, smallest sun was overhead at the moment, and its bright, bluish light made her squint even through the Air Force-issue sunglasses she wore. The Gate sat upon on a small hill surrounded by a rolling plain of sandy, rocky terrain, with the suggestion of a canyon a short distance away. Further details were obscured by the haze of heat waves rising from the ground.
"Wow." The Colonel stepped past her, boots crunching in the dry soil underfoot. "Note to self: when Carter's report says 'very warm', what she really means is 'blazing hot'."
"Oh, it's not that bad," Daniel replied off-handedly, walking past them to check the DHD. "We've got water, and plenty of sun-block; it's not like we're planning on spending several days here." He stripped off his uniform jacket as he spoke, and Sam could see patches of sweat already beginning to darken the fabric of the T-shirt beneath his arms.
"Of course it feels like home to you," Jack muttered, irritably. "But some of us aren't all that fond of deserts."
"At least there are no trees, O'Neill."
Sam threw a quick grin in Teal'c's direction. Of the four of them, he appeared least affected by the heat; he'd even turned down sunglasses, claiming to have lived and fought in climates worse than this while in Apophis' service. She received only a raised eyebrow in response to her smile, but after seven years of serving with the taciturn Jaffa she'd learned to see the subtleties in his expressions. A twinkle in his eye and a twitch at the corner of his mouth gave away his amusement.
"Very funny, Teal'c." Jack turned to Sam with a carefully bland expression, and gestured toward the foot of the hill with the P-90 clasped in his arms. "So which way do we go, Carter? This is your party."
Sam schooled her face back into 'mission mode' and pointed in the direction of the narrow canyon. "That way, sir. The initial MALP readings picked up mostly cinder, gypsum, and evaporite deposits; I think a lot of this area might once have been covered with water. If there was a living culture here at one time, it seems likely that they would have moved into more sheltered areas, like that canyon, to protect themselves from the growing heat ..."
"... And regardless, any evidence washed into the canyon by receding waters would be more likely to have remained unburied than anything out here in the open," Daniel interrupted, completing the thought. "In fact, I'm surprised the Gate is still exposed; any open water here must have dried up thousands, even millions of years ago. The dust storms must be fierce." He had tied his jacket around his waist, and was now staring out at the horizon, examining the bank of dirty cloud that hugged the ground in the direction that the blue sun would have risen from.
"Think someone still visits here? Often enough to keep the Gate from getting buried?" Jack perked up at that suggestion.
"The MALP found no evidence to suggest that," Sam objected, then looked down to check her watch. "The specialized UAV I requested will be sent through in another fifteen minutes, though; I'll make sure it gets some shots of the ground while it's up. If it finds any evidence of Goa'uld or other activity, we'll know in a couple of hours."
"All right then," Jack nodded. "Let's get a move on, people. We're burning daylight."
"Uh, Jack? You do remember that there is no night on this planet?" Daniel spoke up, quirking a smile in the Colonel's direction.
"Figure of speech," Jack said in a put-upon voice, and started down the hill.
Sam suppressed a smile and moved to follow.
------------------------------------------------------
The team covered the distance to the canyon quickly, and without incident. They saw no evidence of any kind along the route to hint at previous Goa'uld or other civilized activity on the planet, but Sam's suspicions of organic life were proved true; as they drew closer to the narrow passage, they began discovering small bones and bone fragments scattered amongst the loose stones at their feet.
Sam called a halt a couple of hundred yards from their goal to take a few samples of the bone for testing, and a few more from the rocky soil around them to examine for trace elements when they returned to the base. If Daniel's theory about the dust storms was correct and the planet did still receive visitors, there would have to be a reason; perhaps the MALP readings had been incomplete. She planned to take more samples from the canyon floor as well, and from the strange, protruding earth formations that the MALP's telescoping cameras had detected nearby. She had a couple of theories about how they might be formed, and was eager to see which was correct.
"I think that's enough for now," she said, tucking the last bone sample away in her kit in a protective plastic baggie. "The bone fragments are too small to tell what the animal or animals they belonged to might have looked like, but they were almost certainly warm-blooded vertebrates of some kind, and definitely lived here after the planet's transformation into a desert. There must still be water available, somewhere."
The Colonel sighed and tugged the ball cap from his head, then ran a hand through his sweaty, graying hair. "Did we take a wrong turn into some kind of alternate universe where you're the archaeologist, Carter? I thought you picked this planet because of the unusual stellar arrangement, or something."
"Oh, I did, sir." Sam checked her watch again, then squinted up at the sky. "In fact ... there goes the UAV now." The tiny automated aircraft soared by overhead, special sensor packages and cameras recording information for later assessment. "I can't make any direct observations of the stellar geography of the system, for obvious reasons; I'll have to analyze the data from the UAV when I get back. But that wasn't my only reason for coming."
Jack grunted and put the cap back on. "Carbon-based life in extremely dry environments, Martian studies, yadda yadda," he said, grudgingly. "I read your pre-mission report. I dunno. I just thought we'd get to do something a little more interesting if I put you in charge of picking our next destination - like the time we went to Cassie's planet to observe that black hole eclipse."
"That, of course, being the mission where we lost SG-7 and found out about Nirrti," Daniel put in, dryly. "I should hope this mission would be a little less interesting than that one." He had dropped into a crouch a few paces nearer the canyon than Jack's position, picking over the debris at his feet, with Teal'c looming at his back like a portable shade-generator.
"Indeed," Teal'c commented, raising his eyebrows at the Colonel.
"You know what I mean," Jack groused.
"Don't relax too soon," Daniel added, in an absent tone of voice, as he picked up a larger bone fragment and turned it over in his had. "There are tooth marks all over these bone fragments - deep gouges, and the way they're spaced, they probably came from a pretty large predator. I wouldn't want to meet up with the owner of those teeth unexpectedly."
"Not the kind of excitement I was looking for, Daniel, but thanks for trying," Jack sighed, and glanced back at Sam. "Let's get a move on, then. We'll take a water break at the canyon, re-apply sun-block, and decide where to go from there."
Daniel dropped the bone he was holding and stood, dusting his hands off on the thighs of his uniform pants. "Really, though, I don't think we have much to worry about," he continued. "The dry climate preserves things pretty well, but I'd guess the bones are at least a couple of decades old. If there were a population of these things in the area, I'm sure we'd see more recent spoor."
"That's good to know," Sam said, wiping droplets of sweat out of her eyes as she headed toward the canyon again. The glare had dimmed a bit as the blue sun dipped toward the horizon, but she knew that wouldn't last much longer; the paired red and amber suns would be rising in another hour. The lower oxygen content of the air was beginning to get to her, too; it felt as though she'd been jogging on a treadmill for half an hour, rather than walking. It was better than it could have been, though. After living at more than a mile of altitude in Colorado for the last several years, the team had become acclimatized to relatively thin air.
More details of the narrow gap became visible as they approached it. The cliffs on either side, though steep, were not particularly high - even now, there was not much shadow at the bottom. As the mirage effect of the heat haze dissipated due to lack of distance, however, something else became visible on the canyon floor. The vague whitish blurs that Sam had at first taken to be more highly reflective stone surfaces or perhaps a lighter-colored mineral resolved into something else entirely.
"Wow." Jack whistled softly at the sight. "Got your digital camera with you, Daniel?"
"The predators on this planet must be formidable indeed," Teal'c commented.
Portions of an enormous skeleton were wedged into the space between the cliffs, bones larger than anything Sam had ever seen outside of a museum. The canyon curved a little further in, but just before that point she could see a column of huge vertebrae suspended horizontally a dozen feet off the ground by the arching vault of an enormous ribcage, a macabre tunnel they'd have to walk through if they decided to explore the area further. Other bones littered the narrow space like giant-sized jack straws dropped by a clumsy hand.
"I don't ... I'm not sure, I'll have to take a closer look, but I don't think all of these bones are from land-based creatures," Daniel said calmly, lifting his digital camera to take a few shots. "The larger ones appear considerably more weathered than the fragments we found out there, and they're more protected here, too; they could have been here a very long time. I think they might - from the types of bones I'm seeing, I think they might be from sea-going creatures, wedged here when the water evaporated."
"Like whales?" Sam blurted. "Wow. That's the last thing I expected to find in this place, even if my theory about the third sun proved to be true."
"Well, consider it proven," the Colonel said, gesturing at the boneyard before them. "Shall we take a closer look?"
Act Two: Investigation
The team paused for a water break, then continued up the narrow canyon, documenting the immense skeletal remains and geological features with the digital camera as they walked. The walls of the canyon were made of the same rocky, light-colored earth as the plain they'd crossed and the low hills nearby; nothing aside from the bones seemed especially unique or out of place, but it was hard to tell sometimes what would turn out to be important at first glance. Even if nothing jumped out at them while they were here, it was entirely possible a fresh set of eyes in the scientific department might discover something in the photographs later.
To Sam, the walk felt almost like a tour through a natural history exhibit, one dedicated to the extinction of Earth's dinosaurs. She paused for a moment beneath the arching vault of the vast ribcage that spanned the canyon and gazed upward at the massive vertebrae suspended several feet over her head, mentally estimating the size of the creature they had originally come from. She felt very small in comparison, in a way she'd never felt when faced with enormous astronomical bodies like supernovae or black holes; there was something immediate and vast about these biological ruins that set off instictive warning signals in the back of her mind, as though the unstoppable machine of Entropy was poised on the brink of swallowing her whole.
She shivered a little despite the intense heat, then glanced around at her companions. Next to her, the Colonel had turned to look over his shoulder back the way they'd come. His brow furrowed a little as he studied the curvature of the canyon, which would conceal their point of entry entirely if they proceeded much further, and he glanced down at something clasped in his hand with a concerned grunt.
"We'd better not get turned around in here," Jack said, tilting the object-- a compass-- in Sam's direction.
Sam squinted through the glare reflecting from the compass' face and caught a glimpse of the needle spinning wildly around, refusing to settle on any one point. She grimaced, then reached up to swipe a fresh trail of sweat out of her eyes. "As strong as the magnetic field is, it'll probably also interfere with our radios over any significant distance. I doubt we'll be able to hear anything more than static when the SGC dials in for our checkup a couple of hours from now."
"Shades of P3X-403," Daniel mused aloud, two paces behind them, staring up one side of the canyon at an earthen spire rising to a point several feet above the rim. His hair had already begun to escape from the tan-colored bandana he'd chosen to wear today, sticking out around the edges in sweat-dampened spikes. "It might be a good idea to go ahead and check out some of these earth formations you were interested in, then head back. If the UAV images show anything important, we can always come back with better equipment."
Sam nodded, remembering what she'd heard about the problems the SGC mining teams on the Unas-settled world had faced when trying to find one of their number who had gone missing. She would be a little disappointed to head back early, but on a mission like this one where no lives were on the line, it was better to be safe than sorry. "It looks like the canyon flattens out a little up ahead, we can climb up more easily there. It shouldn't take very long to test my theory about what caused them and take a few samples."
"You spoke of multiple theories prior to our arrival on this planet," Teal'c observed calmly from his place next to Daniel. "What have you observed here to change your mind?"
Sam smiled at him, pleased at his perceptiveness and interest. "From the MALP pictures, it was impossible to tell whether the spires were formed from softer, packed earth, as we can now see they are, or rock, like the formations commonly called hoodoos back on Earth, which might have contained useful minerals. In the latter case, they would have been revealed by the passage of time, as wind and other natural events wore away the material around them. As it is, however, I'd guess there must have been something other than the elements involved in building them."
"Mound-building insects, maybe? Like Macrotermes termites?" Daniel asked, wrinkling his nose. He'd flipped his clip-on sun-glasses up for a better look, and his blue eyes almost seemed to glow in the light of the alien sun. "I've never heard of them living in an environment as extreme as this, but there's always a first time for everything, I suppose."
"Maybe not insects," Sam replied, "but I'm fairly certain some kind of lifeform was involved. The shape and composition of the columns is inconsistent with wind formation, and I can't think of another environmental process that could possibly have created them given the harshness of the environment." She wasn't sure what kind of lifeform it had been-- bacteria binding them together, something larger physically shaping them? Was something hidden beneath the spires?-- but she wanted to find out.
"Well, we won't find out standing here yakking about it," Jack groused. He removed his ball cap again, ruffling his damp hair to dry it a little, then settled the cap back on his head and made an elaborate 'after you' arm gesture in Sam's direction. "Get to it, Carter."
"Yes sir," Sam replied. She exchanged amused glances with Daniel, then took point again, heading toward the lowest visible section of the canyon's now-sloping walls.
The blue sun had begun to set, flickering at one edge of the horizon, and a golden-red glow lit the sky afire at the other. Shadows pooled strangely in and around the giant bones at the canyon's floor as the vaguely underwater hues that had previously characterized the landscape grew progressively warmer. Sam kept an eye on one of the spires as she walked, and was puzzled to see that a dark patch she'd noticed at the top didn't move at all in the shifting light; she'd assumed it was a shadow before, but that clearly wasn't the case. It almost looked as though the spire were hollow... but what could have caused it?
The narrow canyon opened out slowly as the walls dropped, then widened suddenly as the team turned a corner, joining a vast, shallow valley crowded with more of the titanic skeletons. The sight struck Sam speechless for a moment; it looked like nothing so much as a killing ground, or perhaps an elephant's graveyard. More of the skeletons were complete here than had been in the canyon, and they varied more widely in size; the rib bones of one particularly large specimen jutted up against the horizon in a grotesque parody of trees, with tatters of lichen at the tips providing a semblance of leaves and branches.
The sight reminded Sam just how hot and thirsty she was. She called another quick rest break, making sure to dampen her collar and the sleeves of her uniform shirt for a little extra relief once she'd swallowed a few mouthfuls of lukewarm water. Daniel's lips were beginning to crack in the dry heat, so she shared her SPF 30 lip gel with him; he'd brought his own, but he'd forgotten to remove the chocolate bar he habitually carried from that pocket of his vest, and his tube of gel was completely embedded in the resulting sticky goo.
Finally, the team approached a small grouping of the spires. She could see another, much larger cluster of them in the distance, rising up from a swell of ground like the spines of a hedgehog; it almost made her wish she'd brought along one of the ground-penetrating radar scanners the SGC kept on hand for sizable geological and archaeological surveys.
Sam tapped the side of one of the spires with the heel of one hand and found her suspicions confirmed. "It's hollow," she said, marvelling, and unslung her kit to retrieve the small rock hammer she'd brought with an eye to securing possible mineral samples.
"That seems... unlikely," Daniel commented, a thoughtful expression on his face.
"Well, it sure doesn't look like something you'd find in Vancouver or Egypt," Jack replied with a shrug, rapping a second column with his knuckles. "I've always wondered why we don't come across more seriously alien landscapes out here. Is the galaxy really that boring?"
Daniel opened his mouth, looking a little indignant, then shook his head and shut it again; he'd had this argument with Jack several times before. Sam grinned at the pair, still enjoying the renewal of their familiar banter after so many months without it, then stepped past them with the rock hammer and struck firmly against the wall of the first spire. Small chips of packed earth came away under the head; after a moment, a section gave way entirely, creating a small hole into the interior of the column.
She took a moment to secure a few of the earth fragments she'd removed for later study; the flakes had a texture reminiscent of dried mud, a distinct oddity on a planet whose intermittent cloudcover was all dust and no moisture. While she was packing them away, the Colonel stepped forward with a flashlight in hand, shining it into the opening she'd made.
"Nothing in here," he said, tilting the light first upward, then down. "It's like the inside of a chimney. Big hole at the top, hollow all the way down. Can't see the bottom, though; looks like it opens out into a cave."
"I wonder if they're all like that?" Daniel mused, looking over at the larger, distant complex of spires that Sam had noticed earlier.
"Let's find out," Sam suggested, picking up the hammer again and moving to strike the column Jack had tested with his hand. The wall was a little thicker on this one, but was no more difficult to pierce than the other, and soon she was peering into the interior of another empty earthen tube. This spire was angled more toward suns-rise than the other had been, however; she could see a small area of the cavern floor beneath, spotlit by the suns' red-gold rays.
"I don't suppose there's any easy way to get down there," she said dubiously, more curious than ever about the origin and purpose of the earthen formations. She'd never seen anything quite like them before.
Jack shook his head. "I didn't see any cave mouths on our way here, and without climbing gear I'd rather not try to shimmy down one of these things."
And of course they had to be concerned about the possibility of predators, too, Sam thought. Maybe whatever had chewed up those bones out by the Stargate had moved on a long time ago, and maybe it didn't lair underground, but there was no way to be sure without going down there, and the chimney-like entrances would make it difficult for them to escape in a hurry if they needed to.
Daniel frowned and began digging in his own pack. "Wait a minute, I have an idea..."
Jack frowned at him. "If this idea of yours involves you going down there alone..."
"No, no..." Daniel cut him off. "I'm just looking for... ah, there it is." He raised one hand, revealing a spare digital video recorder he'd probably been carrying 'just in case'. "Do you still carry duct tape, Sam?"
"Never leave home without it," she assured him. She retrieved the roll for him, then watched with an intrigued expression as he secured the video recorder to the end of a coil of rope from the Colonel's supplies with a series of knots and expertly applied squares of tough, shiny silver tape. The camera didn't have a light of its own, so he incorporated a flashlight into the assembly too, aimed forward of the lens and fixed into the 'on' position.
"MALP on a rope," Jack commented, grinning as he examined Daniel's completed handiwork. "Sweet."
"You'll have to widen the hole a little," Daniel replied, nodding, as he wound the coil of rope around his arm. "I'll pass the camera through and lower it down into the cavern, then let it spin around a little to get a good look at all the walls before pulling it back up."
"Good idea, Daniel," Sam agreed, and picked up the rock hammer again to widen one of the holes.
Teal'c stepped forward, shaking his head, before she could do so. "Allow me, Major Carter," he said, then raised the butt end of his staff weapon from the ground and used it to strike repeatedly at the nearest column. The dirt crumbled easily at the blows, flaking away and falling into the widening hole to rain down on whatever lay inside.
"Thanks, Teal'c." Daniel pressed the button to turn the video recorder on, then began slowly lowering it through the opening.
Act Three: Discovery
Time seemed to crawl as Daniel lowered the camera slowly into the interior of the hollow earthen spire. The paired suns marched slowly up into the sky, scorching down on the stark, barren landscape around the team, and Sam could feel every individual drop of sweat that trickled down the damp skin of her back and between her breasts. It was a good thing the SGC never issued T-shirts in white.
Teal'c and the Colonel were alternately watching Daniel's progress and the landscape around the spires, keeping an eye out for trouble. Though there didn't seem to be any threat worth noting on the dead, arid surface of the planet, they had been fooled before. The tips of Jack's ears were beginning to redden a little under the onslaught of the suns' rays; Teal'c's scalp was covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and the gold symbol on his forehead was a blaze of reflected light. Sam felt the skin of her own face tightening a little despite the industrial strength sunscreen she'd slathered on, and promised herself a long soak and a moisturizing facial when she got home.
"That should do it," Daniel finally announced. He had leaned forward slightly, glancing down through the opening to watch the progress of the camera as it descended into the cavern. "Going to spin it a little more, and..." His voice trailed off, and he frowned. "What was that?"
Jack perked up, turning away from the scenery to fix all his attention on Daniel. "What was what?"
"I thought I heard... Whoa! I think there's something down there..."
"Daniel? What are you seeing?" Sam asked, both alarmed and curious at this new development.
"What's down there, Daniel?" Jack said again, trying to capture the archaeologist's attention.
Daniel fliched, then took an abrupt step backward, and this time Sam heard whatever he'd been hearing, too; faint high-pitched echoes, something like sonar but distinctly organic in origin. "I don't know, but whatever it is, it doesn't seem to like the flashlight," he said distractedly, and began pulling the rope up as quickly as he could.
He wasn't quick enough. A few seconds later, the rope abruptly jerked out of Daniel's hands, then stopped again; he'd wound the surplus around his right arm so as not to let it slip accidentally, and it caught there, pulling him off-balance with sudden force and dragging him toward the hole.
"Hey, ow!" he exclaimed, digging in his feet, but he failed to gain any traction in the loose, rocky dirt.
"Daniel!" Sam lunged for her friend, but she wasn't close enough to get a grip on him before he was yanked into the column; the Colonel was closer, but the handful of T-shirt he managed to get hold of was torn right out of his grip. Daniel's right arm was dragged into the hole, then his entire upper body as something continued to pull sharply on the other end of the rope.
"Daniel Jackson!" Teal'c grabbed for him this time, gathering handfuls of the material of Daniel's BDU pants and pulling backward with all his might. Jack managed to get a grip on him, too, on his second try, wrapping his fingers around Daniel's belt as Teal'c pulled him slowly back out of the hole. Sam fumbled for her combat knife, then darted forward as soon as Daniel's entangled arm emerged from the column. The rope parted easily under the sharp blade, releasing Daniel to collapse onto the ground with a pained grunt.
"So much for the camera," he said, panting, as he fumbled at what was left of the rope with his free hand.
"Let me get that, Daniel." Sam resheathed her knife and knelt next to him, unwrapping the length of rope where it had tightened around his arm. "Forget about the camera, you're lucky it didn't break your arm. Are you all right? What was that?"
"I don't know." He flexed his wrist and elbow a little once the last of the rope was removed, and grimaced in pain. "I couldn't really see much, just movement in the shadows as the flashlight swivelled around. Then something lunged at it-- it had a wide head and a long tail, but it moved too quick to see much in the way of details. I think there were several of them, but only that one came anywhere near the light, so it was hard to tell."
Jack snorted and reached down for Daniel's uninjured arm, pulling the archaeologist back to his feet. "Must have been pretty big to pull you off your feet like that. Think we found that large predator you were talking about?"
"Possibly," Daniel said, distractedly, still flexing his arm. Bruises were already starting to form, dark and angry-looking under the skin. "Like I said, I couldn't see much, and they moved very, very fast. I'm sure the camera got at least one good shot, but--"
"Well, we're not trying that again," Jack interrupted him. "Doesn't matter what's down there, whatever it is, is dangerous. It probably can't climb up after you, but I'd rather not take the risk."
Sam glanced at the suns again, a quarter of the way across the sky, then down at her watch, and nodded. "The UAV should be on its way back by now, and the SGC will be dialing in for a check-up any minute."
"Good," Jack grunted. "Let's get moving. I'd rather not wait around to find out if there are any more of those things around here." He picked up Daniel's pack, ignoring the younger man's protests, and shook his head. "Figures you would kick over a nest of womp rats, Daniel; 'bout all that's missing from this re-enactment of Tatooine now, is an old guy in a dress."
Daniel snorted, but his expression had lightened. "Careful what you wish for, Jack. I can think of a few system lords out there still who fit that description."
"Indeed," Teal'c agreed, one eyebrow raised and a barely-there smirk signalling his amusement.
Sam choked at the mental image of Ba'al or Anubis playing Obi-Wan Kenobi to Daniel's Luke Skywalker. No-- more like Emperor Palpatine to Daniel's Anakin, given the general Goa'uld attitude. And wouldn't that be a disaster! A Goa'ulded Daniel was way, way up there on the list of things Sam hoped she never lived to see.
Jack looked faintly pleased with himself for his tension-breaking joke, but it didn't impair his alertness any as he took point, leading the team back toward the canyon. Sam shook her head and fell into third, the smile slipping from her face as she watched Daniel trying not to limp in front of her. The only injuries immediately visible from his close encounter were the bruises on his arm, but he'd hit the dirt column with enough force that he was probably bruised from armpit to thigh under his uniform, not to mention how badly the torque must have wrenched his shoulder. Janet would not be happy with him when they got back.
The boneyard seemed even more like a killing ground to Sam as they passed back through it on their journey back toward the Gate. It was still possible that the creatures Daniel had just caught a glimpse of were merely an essentially harmless transient population reacting defensively to their intrusion, but somehow she doubted that. SG-1's luck had always run perpendicular to the easy route. Daniel could find one artifact and use it to correctly predict a tribe of Unas in the hills; surely, it was no coincidence that he'd nearly fallen into a nest of large, unnaturally swift animals shortly after pointing out carnivorous tooth-marks on a handful of splintered bone.
Teal'c covered every solitary spire atop the canyon's walls with his staff weapon as they walked, and the Colonel was paying even more attention to the walls than he had before, as though looking for any sign of an additional entrance to the underground caverns. Sam could feel the effects of their alertness on her own attitude, as the hair stood up on the back of her neck and refused to lie back down. Just once, she would have liked to participate in a mission that went off without a hitch; as it was, she couldn't shake the feeling that the trouble wasn't over yet.
They stopped once more before making the final push to the Stargate, just inside the mouth of the canyon where they'd first gotten a look at the whale-sized skeletons. It was pretty clear by that time they weren't going to be chased back to the SGC, for which small grace Sam was quite thankful. Even better: the whine of the UAV overhead was a welcome reminder that the primary objective of the mission was still within her reach.
Sam smiled a little as she turned her head up to follow the sound, shading her eyes with one hand as the little automated airplane flew through the glare of the paired suns. In half an hour, it and she would both be back through the Gate, and a wealth of data on this implausible solar system's structure would be hers to decipher. She enjoyed her job as team-second on SG-1 very much, but scientific mysteries like this one were the icing on a very tasty cake.
She jumped a little, startled, as another sound interrupted the UAV's familiar buzz, and gazed across the rocky plain to see the second chevron locking into place on the Gate. They'd obviously missed the time set for their first check-up, but standard procedure would have the SGC dialing in at regular intervals afterward, and this activation didn't fit that pattern. She checked her watch again to be sure, then exchanged alarmed glances with the Colonel and moved backward without being told into what little cover there was behind a large rock propped against one of the canyon's walls.
Daniel snugged in behind her, and Teal'c and Jack found their own cover behind convenient skeletal fragments on the opposite side of the canyon. Sam wriggled her fingers and toes as they waited, adding up all the times they'd been trapped like this within sight of the Gate, mere minutes before they would have escaped. On a world with a slave population or valuable resources, however, that was a risk that could be planned for; she was even more baffled at the idea of a Goa'uld visiting this barren place than she had initially been at the idea of the Ancients building a Gate here to begin with. Maybe it was the SGC after all; the obvious alternative-- someone leaking SG-1's itinerary to their enemies-- was a sour weight in her stomach.
The rest of the chevrons lit in quick order, and the horizontal flush of an establishing wormhole quickly settled back into a pool of shimmering blue. Sam fumbled in her vest pockets for her binoculars, and saw the Colonel out of the corner of her eye doing the same as they waited to find out who their visitors were. After a moment's pause, a pair of Jaffa with unfamiliar insignia on their foreheads stepped through the Gate.
Jack groaned audibly. "For crying out loud. You recognize that symbol, big guy?"
Teal'c rumbled an affirmative. "It is an ostrich feather, the mark of a minor Goa'uld called Shu."
"Shoo?" Jack's eyebrows shot up at the name. "As in, 'shoo, go away?'"
"No, as in Shu, the Egyptian god of the atmosphere and of dry winds," Daniel muttered in Sam's ear. "Also a personification of the sun's light-- rather appropriate, considering. According to mythology, he's one of the sons of Ra."
"Probably not a fan of ours, then," Sam joked half-heartedly, watching as several more Jaffa stepped through the wormhole. Several pair after the first two Jaffa carried-- or dragged-- another figure with them, and all bore staff weapons.
The Jaffa were still coming through when one of them abruptly looked up in the direction of the UAV's flight path, and Sam cursed silently, realizing what was about to happen. So much for my research, she thought dispiritedly as a blast from the Jaffa's staff lashed out and knocked the unmanned plane into a tight, descending spiral.
The other Jaffa dropped their charges in a heap before the Gate and fanned out, forming an alert, protective perimeter as the last of their companions finished Gating in. All told, there were some two dozen Jaffa and half a dozen prizoners present when the wormhole finally winked out.
>> Part Two >>
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