Chapter 3: Solving the Puzzle

"So, what have you got?"

Daniel sighed inaudibly and glanced up from his book. He'd known it would only be a matter of time before Jack came by to bug him, but he wasn't really in the mood to deal with him right now. "Nothing.", he replied.

"Nothing?", Jack asked. "What do you mean nothing? Isn't there something in one of these books?"

"Um, yeah. It's right here in this one called Superweapons for Dummies.", Daniel snapped, before taking a deep breath and calming himself. "I've got some stuff from the writings that are visible on that holographic projection. It's a combination of Gou'auld and Ancient."

"That's not nothing, Danny boy.", Jack said, his mood improving.

"It's not something yet either. The complete text wasn't visible in the holographic image of the device. I would need to have either a complete copy of the text or the device itself to complete the translation and know what it does."

"Damn.", Jack muttered. Out loud he asked, "Got a hunch? Anything?"

"Well, the Gou'auld says that the weapon is all powerful and will destroy all enemies. The actual explanation about what the weapon does is in Ancient, and I really need to have the complete text to be able to tell you what it does. I guess that part is in ancient so that if the wrong people got a hold of it they couldn't figure it out. I mean how many Gou'aulds do you know that can read Ancient?"

"Anubis could.", Jack replied.

"Anubis was a special case. The Gou'auld who helped build this weapon didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands, especially those of another Gou'auld. Actually he sounds more like a Tok'ra than a Gou'auld."

"A snake's a snake, Daniel.", Jack said a little impatiently. "Have you got anything from the Ancient stuff?"

"Well, what I've got so far doesn't really make any sense. It says something about aligning symbols."

"There aren't any symbols on the thingy.", Jack stated the obvious.

"Maybe they're somewhere else on the device that we couldn't see, or maybe there's another part of it that Ba'al doesn't know about."

"Great, so it comes in pieces.", Jack grimaced. It seemed hard enough to find the damn thing in the first place, let alone finding missing pieces of it.

"On the bright side, if I'm right and it does take more than one piece to make it work, it'll take Ba'al a lot longer to find all of it."

"Yes, there is that.", Jack said with fake enthusiasm. "I'm gonna go find Teal'c and Carter. See if they've figured out where this thing is yet."

Jack tapped on the door and was greeted with a bright smile from Carter and a slight smile from Teal'c.

"Okay, I'm assuming good news?", he asked.

"I think we've go it sir.", Sam said, bringing up an image of the device on her computer and zeroing in on the side away from the text where a small drawing of a sun was visible. When she enlarged it Jack could see a gate symbol in the center of the sun and the additional six hidden amongst the sun's rays.

"We're assuming that sun is the point of origin.", Sam said.

"And this is the address to the planet where the weapon is hidden?", Jack asked, with a slight disbelieving edge to his voice. For people as smart as the Ancient and the snake had been they seemed to be really stupid if that was how they'd chosen to conceal the location of the weapon.

"No, sir.", Sam replied.

"Okay, I'm confused."

"The set of symbols on that sun appear to be the location of the other part of the device."

"Great, so we know where to find the second part, but we still don't have a clue where the first part is."

Sam rolled her eyes. "If you'd let me finish sir."

Jack gave her his best innocent look.

"The gate address to the planet is hidden within the Ancient text. While Daniel was translating it he came across what appeared to be a series of random numbers. I translated the numbers into the gate address."

"So we have the address?"

"Indeed.", said Teal'c handing Jack the paper with the seven symbols.