He shook his head. “Can’t say. It doesn’t look old at all, but appearances can be deceiving.”
“They sure can…” Carter stood up. “What about that base plate? That doesn’t look like granite.”
“No, I’m going to have to get down there. We’re going to need a ladder.”
“Funny you should say that,” said O’Neill, walking quickly up to join them. He was carrying a heavy cylinder of olive-colored fabric in one hand, which he set down next to the shaft. “Got one right here. But check this out.”
They followed him to a pile of debris, near the edge of the pit. There was a ladder bolted to one of the wooden boards that lined the excavation, and Carter initially thought O’Neill was showing it to them, possibly as a quick way of getting down into the shaft. But he was pointing his flashlight at the jumble of discarded items at the ladder’s foot, probably dumped there by people scrambling to get up and out of the pit.
Daniel reached down and hauled something free of the pile. “I’ll be damned.”
It was another ladder, and much like the first; solidly built from square-section wood, reinforced at one end with angled iron plates. But the other end was very different — the wood there had been splintered apart, the bottom rung compressed laterally until its centre was a forest of shards.
The ladder looked as though it had been snipped messily in half.
Daniel passed Carter his flashlight, and then took the ladder in both hands and carried it over to the shaft. She followed him, making sure his way was lit, and then watched him lower it, damaged end first, into the hole.
The angled plates at the top edge dug solidly into the sand. “Look at this. It just hits the baseplate.”
Carter aimed one of the torches down. Sure enough, the broken end of the ladder was resting a fraction above the golden metal. And there was something else, something’s she’d not noticed before. “Splinters,” she told him, pointing. “There, in the middle. See?”
A few pale shards of wood littered the centre of the baseplate. One or two stood vertical, as though trapped there.
“I think that plate is at least two separate pieces. They must have come together and snipped the ladder in half.”
“‘The sacred seals are in place’,” Teal’c quoted. He had appeared from nowhere, and was looming at the shaft’s edge, aiming his own flashlight into the depths. “It would appear that this entrance is deeper than we had first assumed.”
“Depends how long the ladder was originally, I guess…” Carter leaned further over the hole, steadying herself with one hand as she scanned around the interior of the shaft with the beam of her flashlight. The stonework seemed featureless, the joints between the granite blocks so fine they were barely visible. She tried to visualize how the shaft was put together: long slabs of smooth black stone, maybe a meter across, half that high, set atop one another in a series of open squares. The only vertical joints she could see were at the corners, and the entire shaft was tilted back by maybe thirty degrees.
No, she corrected herself: not tilted, as such. Carefully and deliberately crafted to rake back at that puzzling angle. The slabs on either side of the shaft were cut so that their upper and lower edges were perfectly horizontal. They exactly matched the level surface of the baseplate, the ‘sacred seal’ that had closed like a sliding door and snipped a sturdy wooden ladder like matchwood.
The inside of the shaft seemed impenetrable, which made no sense at all. Something had caused the baseplate to scissor closed over the ladder, and Carter couldn’t believe that what had closed could not be opened again.
The solution, she was sure, simply lay in detailed investigation. “Teal’c, can you hold the top of this ladder for me?”
Daniel’s flashlight beam shone into her face. “You’re going in there?”
“Yeah. I’m sure there must be a mechanism for opening that metal plate, but I can’t find it from up here.”
“Shouldn’t I go?”
“You don’t know what to look for,” she smiled, made sure her gun was securely swung around at her back, and threw a leg over the edge of the shaft. The sole of her boot met a ladder rung, and it seemed steady enough. When she got her other foot onto wood Teal’c knelt down and took the ladder’s upper end in his hands. Carter felt it lock in place as he gripped it.
Their relative positions put their faces almost touching for a moment. She found herself looking into Teal’c’s dark eyes.
“Take great care, Major Carter,” he told her sternly.
“It’s just a few feet.”
“I was not referring to the distance.”
She nodded to him, then climbed down the ladder.
The air in the shaft was oddly cool, even colder than that in the dunes, and there was a strange stillness to it. It reminded Carter of some laboratories, where both the climate and the movement of air was precisely controlled. It felt as though the space encompassed in those polished slabs was waiting, watching her, its breath held.
She descended gingerly, testing her weight on each rung. The last two seemed unsteady, so she bypassed them and stretched a leg down to plant a foot directly onto the golden baseplate. It felt solid under her boot, as strong and still as the stone walls. She eased herself down onto it, still holding tightly onto the ladder in case anything moved.
There was just enough room to turn around, although the shaft’s tilt was disorientating. Without ground-level as a frame of reference, it felt to Carter as though the shaft should be vertical, and the baseplate was angled to tip her over.
“Okay down there?” O’Neill called, his voice echoing oddly.
“Fine. It’s cold, though.”
“It’s cold up here too. I was going to start a campfire, get some marshmallows going…”
“Save some for me.” The flashlight beam was reflecting off the polished stone, making it difficult to see the granite surface in any detail. Carter paused, took a deep breath, then switched the light off.
Instantly she heard O’Neill’s voice. “Carter? Something wrong?”
“Just using the Force, sir.” In reality, she was using her fingertips.
Without the flashlight’s shimmering reflections to distract her, she put out a hand and began to feel the smooth stone panels around her. After a few seconds she even closed her eyes, letting herself focus entirely on the coolness beneath her fingers, the slight variances in the stone’s texture, the seams and edges that she could not have seen by torchlight alone. And she had been wrong about the shaft, she knew that now. Its surface was not quite perfect.
Almost, but not quite.
About half a meter above the baseplate, on the side of the shaft that tilted back towards her, there were two seams that had no analogue either above or below. Carter opened her eyes, switched the flashlight back on and, after a few moments letting her sight readjust, saw that the slab there was split into three.
The middle part was as wide as her hand, perfectly regular and set so skillfully into the surrounding stone that it was difficult to see it at all, even from so close. There was no space around it to get even a fingernail into, much less a knife or any other tool, and Carter didn’t try. Instead she tried to remember the other pieces of Goa’uld technology she had encountered, and how they had been concealed. Sometimes, she thought, all one needed to do was push.
The panel clicked under her palm, sank in a short way, then slid aside.
Glassy crystals glowed faintly in the cavity she had revealed. “Got something,” she called up.
“Define ‘something’.”
“Some kind of control array.” She studied the crystals closely, noting their position, the way their facets aligned, the hair-fine tracery of golden circuitry linking them together. “Looks like it’s designed to accept an incoming signal, maybe a sequenced override.”
“So someone could open the seals by remote control?”
“I think so.” She frowned. “One, no, two of these crystals are damaged. The surfaces are crazed. I think this array has been on standby power for a really long time, and there’s been some decay…” She reached out to one of the damaged elements, brushed it with a fingertip. It was warm, and rough to the touch.
“Carter, didn’t Teal’c tell you to be careful?”
“I’m always careful.” She twisted the crystal a quarter-turn, and heard a slight humming sound issue from within the cavity. “Yeah, I’ve got this. I can open the panel from here, sir. I just need to —”
The crystal popped between her fingertips.
The decay must have been far worse than she had thought — some internal corrosion had robbed the glassy shard of all its internal structure, leaving only a shell of material to conduct power and information. As soon as Carter had applied pressure to it the crystal had shattered like a light bulb. In one second it was there, and in the next it was dust and shards.
She gave an involuntary yelp and jerked back as crystal fragments flew up into her face. The flashlight beam dipped away from the cavity as she moved, so that she saw the crystals there glow suddenly, intolerably bright, and then, with an ugly snapping sound, go dark.
The whole array had burned out. Smoke curled up into the cold air.
“Damn,” she muttered. “Colonel, I think I broke something.”
The baseplate slid out from under her.
She grabbed wildly at the ladder, just managed to catch a rung and then there was nothing below her feet but empty air. The flashlight dropped from her other hand as she flailed at the walls, trying to get a better grip, and she saw it spiraling down and away.
Her own words rang in her ears:
It’s just a few feet
.
The others were shouting down at her, hands reaching into the shaft, but she had no time to answer. The rung was cutting into her hand, its rough edges digging painfully into her fingers. She managed to bring one foot up and around, to plant her boot on the lowest whole rung, but as she did the wood cracked horribly under her. Her body fell, slammed into the sloping rear wall of the shaft, and then her agonized grip on the ladder gave way.
She fell.
Polished
stone slid up past Carter, sickeningly fast. She struck out with her hands, spread her feet, trying to get some purchase, but all she managed to do was draw rubbery squeals from her boot soles. And then, with a massive, jolting impact, the base of the shaft hammered up into her and set her sprawling.
She twisted in mid-air, hit something broken and clattering with one shoulder, and tumbled face-first onto a hard surface. The breath went out of her, and when she sucked air desperately back into her lungs it was full of dust and grit.
Carter coughed, spluttered around that crucifying first breath, and clamped her jaws shut over a cry of pain.
The shock of the impact faded after a few heartbeats, leaving her aching. She spat dust, took a tentative breath, and then another. Somewhere far above, voices echoed in the darkness, but she couldn’t make out any words at all.
“Ow,” she managed, finally.
It was bitterly cold, and very dark. There was a soft beam of light issuing from the floor close by, though, and when Carter reached out to it she found her flashlight, half-buried in dust. As she lifted it, more of the gritty stuff came up, dropping in streams from the flash’s grip and lens.
The powder was sifted against the shaft walls in piles. Perhaps it had broken her fall somewhat.
There was a noise in the shaft, a harsh metal clatter. Carter swung her flashlight around in time see the end of a chain ladder tumble down against the black stone, the contents of O’Neill’s olive-colored roll. It failed to reach the bottom by half a meter or so, which gave her a nasty realization of just how far she had fallen.
More lengths of wooden ladder lay tumbled at the bottom of the shaft. She’d hit one as she fell.
The chain ladder began to twitch. Somebody was climbing down. Carter got to her feet, in stages, each stage just a little more painful than the last. “I’m okay,” she managed to call up.
“Coming down anyway.” That was O’Neill.
“Wouldn’t it be better if I came up?” Carter wasn’t sure if she could have made the climb, but the alternative was staying down in this freezing darkness. And, given that there was a good chance Laura Miles had lost an arm in this very place, risking the unstable chain ladder seemed like an attractive proposition.
“Just stay put, Major.”
“If you insist, sir.” Carter turned away from the ladder and brought her gun up, her flashlight held alongside the barrel. There was a doorway at the bottom of the shaft; she could see the edges of it picked out in the cone of light. It was big, its sides angled slightly inwards. Beyond it she could see nothing but darkness, so she resisted the urge to scan the beam around any further, just stood covering the doorway until O’Neill jumped off the last few rungs and landed in the dust as the base of the shaft.
He moved quickly up to stand alongside her, his own gun raised. “Major?”
“I’m fine. Left ankle’s still a little weak, but apart from that I was lucky.”
“So I guess the sacred seals aren’t in place anymore, huh.”
She winced. “Sorry about that, sir. I should have taken things more slowly.”
“Don’t sweat it, Carter. Wasn’t your fault.” He scanned his flashlight around. Behind him, the chain ladder began to jerk again. “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. This isn’t like any Goa’uld structure I’ve seen. Maybe Teal’c or Daniel will be able to throw some light on things.”