This is a cross-over story featuring some of the characters and situations of two commercial properties to which I own no rights and with this work intend no infringement of any kind.
The Stargate SG-1 crowd is drawn from some arbitrary point within the first four seasons; while the Goa'uld are still major antagonists, Janet Frasier is still alive, and Daniel hasn't died more than once or twice.
Lara Croft is more-or-less from the second continuity, that is the first set of Crystal Dynamics games, but presumably before the events of Tomb Raider: Underworld. Not all elements used in the story are canonical, not even to the admittedly flexible continuity of the Tomb Raider universe, much less to the more consistently documented Stargate universe.
Oh, yes. And the events depicted are probably a sequence-breaker for both continuities.
I need to be clear that all reference to actual countries, cities, peoples, institutions, and of course individual historical figures should be assumed to be entirely fictional and referenced entirely for the sake of telling an interesting story. No attempt is made to provide a reasoned or honest description or analysis of anything from the real world, from the quality of the cyan waters off Comino for skin diving to the mixed record of the Gadaffi regime.
The Mediterranean Sea, 36°01′N 14°20′E
The Amelia II was in the shallow water of Blue Lagoon Bay off Comino, the turquoise water throwing back a sparkling reflection of her white hull and chrome fittings. She was a trim and lean 65-foot cruiser yacht — with minimum (though luxurious) accommodations and a racing hull. The pair of 600 HP marine diesels were powerful enough to push a torpedo boat through the water, and the craft was stout enough to take rough seas anywhere from the Cape of Good Hope to the Bering Strait.
Its pilot, owner, and sole occupant was also trim and elegant and had a lot more power under the hull than might be thought at first glance. She had started her day with a tough swim in some of her favorite waters, and as she dried off in the strong Mediterranean sun on the polished teak dive platform over the fantail of her yacht she was reviewing her notes.
"An unusual Horus jar showed up at a small private auction; it was from the personal collection of Catherine Langford, an eccentric Egyptologist." Her voice was melodious and measured, with the accent of South London softened by years in finishing school. "Unlike the straight wings of most Egyptian depictions, this one has raised wings that are strikingly similar to the Hawk of Quraish."
It became more than an academic interest when the auction house was bombed that very night: transparently, in an effort to cover up the theft of several items, the Horus jar in particular. The authorities had tentatively linked the bombing to the IRA (or, rather, RIRA, which was composed of breakaway members of the Provisional IRA), but Black Mike — a friend she had first met on the Endurance — had used his contacts on her behalf. Which uncovered the clue that the RIRA members behind the bombing had been taking orders from Libya.
"The oldest depiction of the Hawk of Quraish is in Tripoli, on the Arch of Marcus Aurelius." Which was unfortunately in a rather public place, and while she was scaling it to look more closely at some puzzling — though nearly microscopic — markings she had attracted unwelcome attention. Not just local cops, but Colonel Muammar Gadaffi's personal troops as well.
After shaking off the Amazonian Guard, she had gone to interview the leading authority in Libya on pre-Roman antiquities. Who she discovered was currently a political prisoner in the notorious prison of Abu Salim. Breaking him out had made for an exciting night's work, and gave her new grapple gun an excellent field test.
Tawfiq Al Shafar had given her enough information to her out into the Tripolitan Sahara, to the ancient trilithon of Senam Bu-Samida. There she had to evade more attention from the Amazonian Guard, and a surprising number of armed regulars as well, who didn't appear to want outsiders stumbling upon the rambling chambers in Old Kingdom style hidden under the neolithic stones.
The reason was clear enough in the ultimate chamber deep underneath the shifting sands and behind a devilishly clever tilting slab of massive stone. Lara came to her feet, brushing rock dust and finely ground sand from her brown shorts. The powerful LED light hooked to her pack straps cast a cone of light into the dust filling the air.
Horus stood there, the body of a powerful, muscular man, bare to the waist in the classical garb of Old Kingdom Egypt, but his head the head of a raptor; a hook-beaked predator with that startling outlining of the eye that lent itself so well to depiction in Egyptian artwork. Like most Egyptian statuary it was of larger than human proportion, and likewise (at least, until the sad, faintly despairing fin de seicle flavor of the Ptolemiac sculpture) it broadcast power and arrogance and disdain. Lara felt sure that if the ancient Egyptian gods had been real beings, she would not have enjoyed their company.
The dias below the god, elaborately carved with the typical papyrus tree motifs, divided into three equal decorative niches. In a small pile of rubble from a minor rock fall from somewhere in the past millennia was the broken base of what could only be the twin to Catherine Langford's Horus Jar.
"Twins…or triplets," Lara said aloud. "The Colonel knows of this chamber. I wonder if this was where he headed when he went into the desert to 'meditate.' I imagine he holds the third jar that had been stored here."
She had to wonder what that jar contained, and if it might explain his meteoric rise to power, and his almost uncanny ability to weather the turbulent politics of this part of the world. She had witnessed stranger things.
She wondered how much he had studied the inscription on the walls. On first reading it was the typical voluble, obsequious praising of the god or Pharoah. The ancients went for that, as well as obsessive listing of possessions down to how many wives and how many sheep. Very rarely, she had found, did an inscription say, "Pull the lever to your left to gain super powers."
This one was typical; "…These generous gifts of the benevolent and mighty Horus, the God who Weeps…" And there was the falcon again, staring haughtily from the third line of the inscription.
Except, Except the falcon was staring the wrong way. Lara's lips parted in excitement. "Those ancient scribes were clever — clever enough to communicate with each other using subtle word-play, right under the noses of their Pharaoh. It should be facing towards the central figure, or towards the start of a line. If you assume this one falcon is not an error, but is a clue, then…"
Then the text was meant to be read Boustropherically; each line in an alternate direction. The third line was basically a palindrome, but beginning with the fifth line the meaning of the full inscription came out quite differently. "Beware the generosity of the traitor god, he that weeps but is not blind," she paraphrased. "But wait; if you read the cartouche backwards as well, the silphium follows the falcon. Drop the excess syllables, and the name of the god comes out not Horus…but Hodur!"
"What is a Norse god doing in an Egyptian inscription?"
The sun had warmed her and the white one-piece suit had dried on her body. She uncurled from the deck chair and padded bare-footed into the shade of the cabin. A few small decorative artifacts occupied spaces in the wooden shelves, and a very modern laptop was on the desk. Lara keyed up an image of the text from the hidden chamber under Senam Bu-Samida.
"Hodur is mentioned only briefly in the eddas," she said, "mostly as the brother of Baldr. Baldr the Brave, a great hero of Norse legend, a warrior whose prowess would be key in the final battle. Except that he died in an accident, by an arrow loosed by his own blind brother."
What possible connection could that blind god have to one of the major figures of Egyptian mythology, the far-seeing god whose eye became a near-universal symbol of protection among the watercraft of the Mediterranean Sea for thousands of years?
Perhaps this afternoon she would have answers. Lara carefully put away her journal and materials, then pulled up the anchor. The big marine diesels caught instantly and she turned the wheel East SouthEast, heading around the tiny island nation towards it's capitol, Valletta and the National Museum of Archeology; where the more fragile artifacts from the Tarxien Temples were currently stored.
The Mountain, 38°44′32.91″N 104°50′54.40″W
"Whatcha working on, Carter?"
Sam — Major Samantha Carter, astrophysicist and Air Force officer — looked up from the cluttered lab bench with what looked like a friendly smile to anyone who didn't know her. "It's fascinating, sir," she told the newcomer. "We've discovered an apparent violation of Lorenz Covariance." Her grin grew. "But Doctor Lee could explain it much better than I could…"
"Well, um, Jack," the stocky, bespectacled scientist began.
"Colonel."
"Well, um, Colonel," the third person in the small experimental lab continued without missing a beat, "We were noticing a recent and recurring uptick in the data stream from the gate network. See, normally, this would be happening in the background so to speak. Not something the average gate user would ever know about." He had pushed back his chair from the lab bench and was rapidly warming to his subject. "But since Earth's primary gate was first opened without a DHD, the data stream is visible to our computers…err, you do know about that, right? That we had to open the gate the first times with our own hand-grown system, not the Dial Home Device that the Ancients originally designed?"
"Yes," Colonel Jack O'Neill, also of the Air Force and Sam's nominal superior, dead-panned. "I was there."
"Oh, right. When Doctor Jackson first made the insight about the gate coordinate system. Fortunately Abydos was close enough that the gate was able to compensate for stellar drift over a few thousand years, or we'd have never opened that first wormhole! It's all part of the problem of the expanding universe. Which isn't really expanding per se. I mean space isn't getting bigger. Well, it is, but I mean things aren't flying away from us. Well, they are, but it isn't because the universe is exploding. It's all due to expansion of the metric."
"I know about the expanding universe," the Colonel said. "I read that book by that wheelchair guy. Some of it. The first chapter, I read the first chapter."
Bill Lee sighed, then put on his friendliest teacher face. "It isn't that complicated, really. First off, you have to understand that every frame of inertial reference is unique. Observations within a reference frame are consistent, but that's where Universal Gravitation and the rest of the Newtonian universe breaks down…"
Sam made a cutting motion. "I'm sorry," she said. "He's egging you on, Bill. The Colonel knows this stuff. He just likes to play dumb."
"I'm not just playing," the tall, brown-haired Air Force Colonel in rumpled fatigues dead-panned, with that little eyebrow twitch that after several years (and some very strict Air Force regulations to consider) still made Sam a little weak at the knees.
"He was bored and decided to make a nuisance of himself around the lab. It was either that or bug Daniel, and Daniel isn't as much fun for him to bug. So I sic'd you on him in revenge."
"He does, and you did, and is he really? I mean Doctor Jackson, of course."
"That was unfair of me, and I'm sorry." Sam sighed, still annoyed at herself. "Doctor Lee's discovery is important, Colonel, and he gets full credit for making it. If you have the time, sir, we were about to brief General Hammond on our findings."
"You want me to be a nuisance to Hammond as well? I can do that. And in the evening, I can go be a nuisance to Doctor Frasier. Except she has needles. I'm afraid of needles."
Sam looked him straight in the eyes. With those large blue eyes she knew had just as powerful an effect on him as he did on her. "Sir, you are never just a nuisance. Your insights are always invaluable."
Bill Lee looked back and forth at the two Air Force officers. He wasn't the most perspicacious person around, but there was a subtext here you could cut with a knife. In a rare moment of empathy for him, he loudly cleared his throat. "I'll get that printout ready. This would be a good time to go to Hammond's office."
"So what you are saying, is that the wormhole network is updating our stargate more often than it should be." General Hammond was a bald, no-nonsense barrel of a man in blue short-sleeved uniform shirt. He had the ability to grasp a situation quickly, and the experience to be decisive about his orders in regards to that situation. "Could this be an attack or exploit by one of our enemies?"
"We haven't ruled that out, sir," Sam replied. "We've isolated the wormhole computers from the network and are manually patching through corrections only as they become mandatory."
"These corrections," Hammond cut quickly to the heart of it. "This means there is something real in space that involves our gate?"
"Yes," Sam said reluctantly. She hated having to commit herself before all the science had been done.
Colonel O'Neill looked back and forth between the two scientists. He scratched his head. "Lemme see if I understand. The gates compensate for stellar drift. They move the coordinates so the gates go to where the stars are today, not where they were back when cavemen were riding dinosaurs around."
Bill Lee started to say something but Carter cut him off with a look. "Yes, sir, in a manner of speaking. Simultaneity is a tricky concept in a relativistic universe. Earth, or Abydos, has a unique inertial reference frame, meaning time itself is moving at a slightly different rate for each world. You can think of the wormhole network for this galaxy as having a single and arbitrary reference frame, which it uses as a template to adjust the connections between the stargates on different world. Sir, even the Antartica gate has to worry about this; the rotation of Earth is enough to cause a misalignment of clocks between there and here. It's the same thing the GPS system has to deal with to generate accurate coordinates for users on the ground."
"So the network is like Greenwich, and our gate synchronizes its watch to it every so often."
"Yes, sir." Sam was approving. "Another example would be your cell phone. The network calls it at intervals to find out where it is, and updates the stored location so it doesn't have to send a signal to every tower in town every time you get a text message."
"The problem we are having," Bill could not contain his need to contribute, "Is there has been an uptick in the number and frequency of these automated updates."
"So the Earth is roaming?" Colonel O'Neill asked.
"Roaming?" Bill Lee didn't understand the reference at first. "Oh, roaming. Like a cell phone you mean. Yes, that's it, the wormhole network thinks we are roaming. Oh, he he, I hope the Ancients don't bill us with a roaming charge! Ah ha ha ha ha! Ah ha ha…ahem."
"Yes, sirs," Sam waited for Bill Lee to finish. "Earth isn't where or when the network thinks we should be, and is pinging us more frequently to try to keep us connected. We're stuttering, sir. The first incident I've discovered in our records is from three years ago, and although still rare the data suggests the frequency is increasing geometrically."
"Pardon me," General Hammond spoke then. "When or where? Do we not know which?"
Sam made that habitual gesture of hers that looked like she was pushing her glasses back on her nose. Except she didn't wear glasses, and the gesture looked nothing like that. "That's the problem of a relativistic universe, sirs. When is where and where is when."
"Ku ku chaloo."
They all ignored O'Neill's comment. They'd gotten good at that. "Well, which ever it is, is this going to be a problem for us?" Hammond asked. "What order of magnitude are we talking about here?"
"In terms of space, sir, tens of kilometers with each update. The wormhole network can compensate for that easily, but of the two possibilities that is the one that scares me most. The expansion of the metric doesn't apply at such fine scales. There shouldn't be grain in the expansion, not like that. It would mean something is seriously wrong either with space itself, or at least of our understanding of the universe."
"That's the option that worries you most?" the General questioned. "And the one that isn't as scary is…?"
"Oh, that's simple. It just means our solar system is micro-jumping in time."
Malta, 35°53′52″N 14°30′45″E
The National Museum of Archeology on Republic Street in Valetta was housed in the Auberge de Provence, a fine baroque building once used by the Knights of Malta. Lara Croft passed through the ground floor, admiring a reconstruction of the Hypogeum of Paola, excavated by the Maltese archeologist and polyglot Sir Thermistocles Zammit. The Grand Salon currently held a temporary exhibition of Modern Art, of which Lara was informed but largely uninterested. Within a few more minutes she was ushered in the office of the current curator.
Doctor Montanaro Gauci was apparently a man who took his work home with him. A crumbling bit of stone rested on a protective cloth under the powerful desk light, surrounded by printouts of micrographic images and chemical analysis. "Pardon the mess," he said wryly, coming up from around his desk to take Lara's hand. "Conservation has become a high-tech science, and I do try to keep up."
"Doctor Gauci," she took his hand. "Then I am even more thankful you were able to spare me a little of your time."
"Dear Miss Croft, it is the least I could do, after the aid you gave to one of my colleagues. I just received word this morning; he and his family made it safely to Rome."
There were more official-looking visitor's rooms elsewhere, with the requisite carpeted floors, massive desk, carefully selected artifacts, and a drop-down screen for the odd Power Point presentation to a potential sponsor. This was a working room instead, cluttered with books and paperwork and a large and eclectic personal collection.
Lara had the poise and manners to move comfortably in social circumstances, from a hot Shinjuku nightclub to a garden party in Windsor, but this was her preferred environment. The dusty shelves of artifacts, each holding magnificent stories for the person who knew how to listen to them. For some reason though, she reflected ruefully, her professional relationships did not do as well. It was troubling how many one-time colleagues had became acrimonious rivals over the years.
There was the falcon again, perched on one corner of the heavy-looking desk. This one, however, was realistically depicted in some dark material, possibly resin or stone. Doctor Gauci saw her looking towards the black bird, and grinned. "The Tribute of the Falcon, of course."
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, clashing with Suleiman the Magnificent in the long drawn-out conflict between Renaissance Christendom and the Ottoman Empire, had granted Malta, Gozo and the city of Tripoli to a branch of the militant religious order the Knights Hospitaller in return for the nominal tribute of a single falcon to be presented each All Saint's Day. The order stayed until 1798, when they were bankrupt by the French Revolution and then ousted physically by Napoleon, but until then had ruled the island and driven back the Ottoman Empire in the first major reversals that power had suffered.
"A prop, that is," Doctor Gauci grinned. He picked up the black bird. "This is a replica of the prop used in the Humphrey Bogart film, made in a small shop in San Francisco that specializes in Dashiell Hammett memorabilia."
Lara grinned in reply. Then winced all but imperceptibly at a memory of her own time in The City by the Bay.
She had been much younger then, and moved with the swallowed-a-sword posture of a recent graduate of finishing school. She was too credulous, and too convinced of the rightness of her own instincts, and she was sure, sure, that the great looming pyramid in the center of San Francisco's financial district had been secretly funded by the Illuminati.
Her research had been hasty and incomplete, and led her to believe (erroneously) that the only access to the interior of the aluminium-clad upper spire would be from outside.
She had a passing familiarity with climbing from following her father to some of his excavations. But this large, and public, skyscraper was a unique problem. While strolling the crowds in the crowded, tourist-kitschy Fisherman's Wharf — the northern waterfront of the city a local much-beloved columnist had named "Bagdad by the Bay" — she had a breakthrough. On the greens below Girardelli square, from which still wafted the unmistakable odor of fresh chocolate, a row of tall decorative iron lampposts marched in a gentle curve to the gates of the Maritime Museum.
The greens were filled with tourists and children and sunbathers and day painters and students. And some of the later were formed an excited group around two of the towering lampposts.
As she watched, a young man in a cropped orange shirt swung his body in an arc about the decorative Art Nouveau arm of one fixture, his head at least four meters above the ground, then released; hurling through space in a gymnastic move that brought him with a smack of the palms into the arms of the next post along.
There was a cheer from the crowd, and a round of friendly taunting. As she watched, a dark-haired young man in denim shorts, and a young woman shorter than Lara herself scrambled in turn up the first post, transferred their grip to the narrow metal arm, then performed the pull-over that began the routine. Lara could not suppress her gasp of fear as each in turn launched themselves into space, and she didn't begin breathing normally until each had returned safely to the ground.
She was an accomplished gymnast already. Her hands moved unconsciously, rehearsing the motions. She had not noticed that she had also drawn closer, pushing through the crowd, but one of the climbers did. The young man in the cropped orange shirt looked at her in friendly challenge. "You going to try?"
"Not without gloves," Lara said, and turned away.
Twenty minutes later she was back, having purchased gloves at one of the trendy stores lining the area, and clothes a little easier to move in than the calve-length white sundress she had been wearing. Both boys spotted her climb, and that was a good thing as she failed to stick the first jump. Hitting rough cast iron instead of the more forgiving equipment of a modern gymnasium had stung, even through gloves, and that broke her concentration. But she made the next one.
"You should talk to Jon," the lamppost jumpers had told her after a time. "He gets off shift at four."
Having money made for a more practical approach. Lara strolled to the pedibike dispatch stall, and put down money for a hire. "I want Jon," she said. "As soon as he is available."
As the very fit young man with the French accent pedaled her down the Embarcadero he told Lara over his shoulder a little of San Francisco's burgeoning "buildering" community. She had heard, vaguely, of the Night Climbers of Cambridge, or the "vadders" who explored the steam tunnels under MIT, but her background lacked the experience of being at a major university. And as far back as urban climbing went, this was still well before the term "Parkour" was on every lip.
After she promised to read up a little — the 'zine "Urban Archeology" was available in the independents section of local comic book stores — he gave her an invite to a crawl taking place that weekend. "16th St. Mission station," he said. "Bring a flashlight. And waterproof shoes."
Over the next few weeks, she learned many of the names and faces of the people who were exploring the usually untrod parts of the city. Some were photographers, some students of architecture, others were in it for the thrill. They got chased out of at least one storm drain, performed a reccee of the Golden Gate bridge for a team that intended to abseil down into Fort Point, took pictures of climbers on an otherwise unremarkable building for the local 'zine. And she learned her urban climbing skills, mostly in (relatively) safer surrounds, like doing a long traverse around the outside of the Museum of Modern Art, or practicing more dynamic moves in the rather more controlled surroundings of the Pickle Family Circus circus arts school; a tottering warehouse filled with old props and chalk dust in the Mission District.
Her funds were the deciding point in favor of the very public ascent they made one typically fog-shrouded weekday night. All went more or less as planned. The trickiest part had been the transfer from the scalable inner core to the wide "wings" that framed out the lower stories, but from there it was a simple if exhausting set of repeated mantling exercises. About two in the morning the fog broke, and by two-thirty their ascent was made more colorful by a cluster of parked police cars.
And the aluminium cap had no form of access from outside. With a clever bit of rope-work they were able to summit, and clasp hands over the glass final cap, brilliantly lit by the red aircraft beacon inside. Ruefully, Lara realized there had to be internal access to service all of those light bulbs, and her research had been in error.
Fortunately the final part of the plan also worked to perfection. After a few heart-stopping moments as they parted and ran face-down down the sharply slanting sides of the building, their parasails popped open. And thus they BASE jumped over the surrounding buildings and the waiting police to the safety of their friend's getaway vans.