A/N: Wow! – over 100 reviews, thanks again for your interest in my story. Here's the next part...
Chapter 16 – A Discovery
A couple of days passed on the planet. Jack and Sam were slowly digging a large hole looking for the stargate. Rover spent his days hunting small rodents he spied in the brush. Sam had to laugh, whenever he found his prey, he would pounce on it looking more like her old cat Shrodinger playing with catnip toys than a dragon hunting for its food. Jack had decided to name him Rover since Sam refused to allow him to be named Santa's Little Helper and since, as Jack put it, he 'roved'.
He was growing quickly. Right now he was about the size of a Great Dane, and when he stretched his wings, they were at least 10 feet across. Sam constantly watched him when he was nearby, still amazed at the opportunity to see such a beautiful, mythical creature up close. She didn't know where he slept at night, always disappearing shortly before sundown, but during the day, he frequently visited her at the crater, or watched Jack as he fished. He seemed to watch them with an intelligence behind his shiny black eyes, an intelligence he exhibited when he hunted his food. It seemed to Sam that when he tried a tactic that didn't work, he never did the same thing a second time, while winning moves were always repeated. He was also flying much better than when Sam first saw him, he seemed to take delight in trying to soar above the trees for extended periods of time between his frequent snacks. She was hopeful that by the time she and Jack left, he'd be completely independent and would no longer need the extra fish she knew Jack was feeding him when she wasn't looking.
As Sam reflected on their new friend, she pushed her makeshift shovel into the dirt. She hit something solid and sighed. There were so many rocks and bricks in the dirt, it was tedious to deal with them. The first day she and Jack started digging, they kept getting their hopes up every time they hit something, thinking it might be the stargate, only to find yet another rock. She shifted her shovel over a few inches to scoop the rock out, and hit it again. She shifted further and hit the rock again. This was a big one, she would probably need Jack's help to get it out of the way. Sam started to scoop the dirt off of the rock to uncover it and make it easier for them to remove later. Then she saw it, one of the symbols that had become near and dear to her over the past 8 years. She knelt down and started frantically scooping away the dirt with her hands. Another symbol showed itself and then part of a chevron.
Jack was standing on a rock overhanging a deep pool at the edge of the lake. He was leaning over, looking into the water, trying to coax the fish nibbling on his bait to finally take it. "JACK! We've found it! Come quick!" Sam's sudden, loud radio transmission startled him enough to lose his footing and slip off of the rock, falling into the water. He surfaced quickly and started swimming to shore, cursing the loss of his best fishing rod. OK, it was just a glorified stick, with the fishing line attached to it, but still. It had a nice whippiness to it, which he needed to catch the ever elusive alien fish.
He got to shore and tried to wipe as much of the water off of himself as he could, trying to think of something, anything, to tell Sam as the reason he was so wet. He wasn't about to admit he had fallen in. He quickly gathered up all of his stuff and started to run back to where Sam was digging the gate out.
When he got closer, he started to get concerned. She was sitting on the ground, arms around her legs and face buried in her knees. Jack looked behind her and saw the stargate, partially uncovered. "Sam?" She didn't respond. "Sam? What's wrong?"
Jack looked closer at Sam and saw a tear trailing down her cheek. "Carter? You ok?"
When she still didn't respond, he knelt down between her and the gate and put his hand on her back. He took a frustrated look back down at the gate. He didn't understand, there was the way home, it only needed to be uncovered the rest of the way. Wait... No... It couldn't be. The explosion didn't seem like it had been that bad, but... Close to where the exposed part of the gate disappeared under the dirt, he saw the problem, a crack he hadn't noticed when he first looked. The gate was broken apart, even Sam wouldn't be able to fix it.
