STARGATE SG-1 29 Hall of the Two Truths (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think it’s a maze.”

Sam could practically hear the colonel’s eyes roll.

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

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

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

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

“Minotaur?” The colonel again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks good, sir.”

He nodded. “Let’s mark it, Teal’c.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Carter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So it would seem.”

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

Or, maybe he did question it. “Sir —”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not a comforting thought.

On the other side of the doorway, the colonel was choosing left again.

“What was that?” The concern in Daniel’s voice brought them all to a standstill.

“What was what?” asked the colonel, but Daniel shushed him.

“Listen,” he whispered.

Sam strained her ears. She heard nothing. The colonel didn’t either, if she went by the impatient look he was shooting at Daniel. Teal’c, however, had furrowed his brow in concentration.

“There!” exclaimed Daniel, again in a whisper, looking from one to the other for confirmation. Sam hadn’t so much heard it as felt it, a slight trembling in her feet that for a moment gave her a sense of vertigo. Teal’c and the colonel had felt it too, she could tell by the sudden jerkiness of their movements as they tried to maintain their equilibrium. Small pebbles from above skittered down the wall and into the dirt at their feet.

Sam’s first instinct was to look up. A mothership taking off or landing was capable of shaking the ground just this way, but the sky above was clear. Anyway, nothing that size could be that close without them seeing it. Unless it was cloaked.

The ground shook again, more violently this time and with an accompanying rumble that emanated from deep underground. The unexpected upheaval threw Sam off-balance and sent her tumbling into the colonel. He caught her around the waist, keeping her from spinning into the dirt. Their combined momentum slammed them into the wall behind. For just a moment Sam had the wind knocked out of her.

“It’s an earthquake, sir!” she shouted after she got her breath back. The rumbling now was nonstop.

“Ya think?” he called back, ducking protectively over her as dust and more debris showered down from overhead. It took her a moment to realize he still had his arm wrapped around her waist. He seemed to realize it too and let her go.

“I don’t think standing here is a good idea —” It was Daniel shouting now. He was right, they should probably keep going. A moving target was less likely to be hit.

Cringing away from another, larger piece of falling wall, Sam checked the device. The energy level had dropped to its initial baseline, but had started another upward climb. “That was just the first quake, sir. There’s another one coming. We need to find someplace away from these walls.”

“Go! Go!” the colonel shouted, motioning her and the others to move, but his voice was drowned out by yet another thunderous growl from below. Sam felt the earth suddenly give way beneath her and scrambled backwards. Daniel, across from her, did the same. Between them a huge crevice appeared, separating herself and the colonel from Daniel and Teal’c. Sam watched in astonishment as the ground vanished into the ever widening rift, pushing the other two further and further away until it was impossible for them to even think about trying to jump across. If that weren’t enough, another crack was appearing, perpendicular to the original chasm, sending a new fissure right toward the middle of the path on the other side.