The Stargate Initiative
Chapter 4
The next few days were a blur for Ernest as the new personnel who came through began to set up camp. After the initial large group, a few more smaller groups came through, mostly a couple more squads bringing more gear to establish a more secure foothold and ensure the gate room's safety. Sergeant Hammond made sure to keep all of the soldiers in line, but for the most part, he left the civilians alone, which both relieved and frustrated Ernest to no end. Relieved because he didn't have to butt heads with the military, but frustrated because he was still technically "in-charge" of everything, and he still had very little idea of how to lead a small but growing encampment and expedition in a massive alien structure on a foreign planet. At least the soldiers followed Hammond, but the civilians, the various scientists, technicians, linguists, and other who came through all looked to him for leadership.
Some of it was easy. He deferred to the engineers and technicians to surveying the castle and construction. It was still remarkably stable despite the strong weathering of the stones in the castle. Still, he wanted to take no chances and ordered most of the structural engineers to go over the location and make sure everything would be all right for the short term and reinforce anything that might need reinforcing. The technicians were assigned to start setting up various pieces of equipment for the humans to use. The alien control panels and interfaces were still confusing and no one wanted to chance pressing something until everyone had a firm grasp of what the hell they were saying.
The linguists had been having some difficulty with the location, not helped by the fact that there were two main types of alien writing. The older text on the walls, control panels, and interfaces seemed to be some kind of Latin form, but with its own unique flavors and styles that made it difficult to work off of other known forms of the language as a baseline. The newer text was similarly derived from an Egyptian root, but, once again, had distinct dialectical variations that made it quite distinct from ancient Egyptian on Earth. Still, it seemed like they might be nearing a breakthrough soon, at least with some of the base hieroglyphs of the newer language. He was hoping for something he could give back to the professor in a future report.
Currently, he was pinning his hopes on the strange device he had found further back in the base. He'd noticed that, as he went further and further from the gate room, the newer writing quickly disappeared, and the older one remained. In the room with the light projector device, they'd encountered an additional three languages, all far more alien in origin and completely indecipherable at this point, in addition to the Latin-like one. When he had first activated the device, the symbols that appeared in the air confused him. Quickly, however, he'd realized that each dot of light was actually an atom; the single proton-electron pair of hydrogen had given him the clue. But there were far more elements here than Earth had known about. It had to be some kind of constructed language, using one of the most basic concepts of physics and chemistry, something that any advanced race would have knowledge of. If they could find something that helped make it clear what each element was associated with in terms of this form of communication, maybe they could crack it. If they could figure it out, or just figure out what else lay in the device, then who knew what the team could discover.
Another issue, however, had come up when they realized that the planet didn't have the same rotational period as Earth; their estimates put its day at 26 hours. They would have to work out clocks specifically for the planet if they intended their operation to have any long-term synchronicity with the planet's timetables.
As Ernest stood around tapping his notepad with his pen, he looked up to see the progress the military teams were making. Most were moving about silently, doing their best to fortify the gate room. Hammond was supervising the men installing a couple of thirty cals to a fallen beam. Other soldiers were pulling pre-filled sandbags from one of the wheeled crates and setting up nests and cover to hide behind. All Ernest knew was that it had been incredibly difficult to pull several large crates that weighed so much through the gate. They'd set up the middle room in between the sleeping quarters, hologram room, and gate room as an armory to store all the weapons. The sergeant (with Ernest's permission, of course) had started training some of the civilians in handgun usage, using the large window openings as a backdrop and some empty C-ration cans as targets. With unknown potential aliens out there, and at least one known hostile force, and no reliable way to physically return to Earth yet, it seemed like a logical thing to do. Ernest himself was rapidly getting familiar with the M1911, though a few service revolvers were also in the arsenal and favored by some of the personnel. A couple of technicians were even training with some of the spare Garands that were brought through. The fact that they received semi-regular supply shipments from Earth meant that they could afford to expend some of the spare ammunition to train.
As he continued to watch the soldiers set up the fortifications near the gate room, Sergeant Hammond walked over and rested his back against the pillar next to Ernest. He pulled out a small piece of paper and handed it to Ernest. "Dr. Littlefield, we've finished up the inventory of what we have out there," he gestured to the gate room fortifications, "and what we have in the gate room as surplus."
"Excellent!" Ernest said, flipping over to a blank page in his notebook; he preferred to have everything written down, and preferably multiple copies. "What have we got?"
"Well, it's a mix of good news and bad news. Good news is that we won't be hurting for ammo, even with all the extra training. We've got plenty of boxes and spare cartridges, as well as plenty of spare belts for the MGs. In addition, in the event of an attack, we have enough small arms to make sure everyone in the base will have at least one weapon. The room above makes for natural high ground, so we've stuck a couple of MGs up there, and we have two men patrolling with B.A.R.s as well. If anything comes through, the upper floor can rain down death. Then you have our lower fortifications. We have interlocking sections of sandbags, using some of the fallen beams as a supplement. We've fastened another set of MGs down here to help."
"What's the bad news?"
"Well, it's kind of a quantity and quality problem. Specifically, the quality of some weapons and our lack of some other pieces of gear." Hammond said, flipping over his paper. "We only have the four MGs, and we've already fastened them down, but truth be told, we could probably do with a couple more, even set up a few additional safe points in this castle if we want. In addition, we have no heavy explosives, no bazookas, only a handful of grenades, and just the two B.A.R.s. We also have no shotguns, and, given that this is a castle, they're something we're probably going to want if we are truly going to make this castle as defensible as possible. Plus, shotguns are something else that the civilians can use; they're easier to use and train with, and you don't really need to be that accurate. In terms of quality … Well, the MGs we're using are Model 1917's, and while they're fine, I'd prefer the 1919's. They use the same caliber, but the latter has a better cooling rate. They're both light machine guns, and I'd like us to have one or two M2's if possible; short of a tank, nothing can withstand a fifty-caliber bullet.
"In terms of our fortifications… well, we're doing our best, but, to be totally honest, Doctor, for a castle, this place is remarkably open. The gate room itself is fairly contained, and that can work against us as well since it's reasonably close from the gate to the sandbags. If a group had a really dedicated charge, or if they could more something well-armored through first, then a lot of our effectiveness might be reduced. If they can overwhelm the sandbags, it's a straight shot to the stairs. This is all assuming conventional, human tactics as well; if we're dealing with aliens, who knows what sort of contraptions they might have and what kind of tactics their technologies favor."
As Ernest finished scribbling down the sergeant's words, he surveyed the room. Hammond was right; the sandbags were only a few yards from the gate. While concentrated fire would certainly be deadly, he could see the sergeant's viewpoint, that some kind of protection moving ahead of the invaders could negate a lot of the combat effectiveness of the machine guns. Tapping his pen to the notepad, he looked over at the sergeant.
"I'll definitely see about most of these, the shotguns, B.A.R.s, and machine guns. Professor Langford mentioned that Roosevelt approved more funding and requisition for us, with the European theater of operations winding down, some supplies can afford to be diverted, so we should get at least some of that. The explosives, I'm not sure about. We're still not entirely sure how stable this castle is and we're not quite willing to risk having stuff that could bring it down on top of us, but, again, it's alien engineering and construction, so if we can figure out that this thing isn't going to collapse if we set off an explosion or two, we might be able to get more decent explosives." Ernest said.
Hammond nodded as he stood straight up and began to walk back toward his men. "I appreciate that, Dr. Littlefield. Thank you for hearing me out." he said.
As Ernest began to write in his notepad once more, one of the linguists assigned to the team came running up the stairs. Running toward the gate, he leaped over a half-complete sandbag foxhole to the annoyance of the soldiers he'd jumped over and ran to the gate. Wheeling around, he looked up at one of the horizontal beams still attached to the ceiling and began to furiously write in his notepad.
Curious, Ernest walked over to him, reaching the linguist just as he finished writing. Racking his brains, Ernest tried to remember the man's name. It started with an S.
"Dr. Littlefield!" he said, looking over at Ernest and breaking the expedition leader's concentration. "I was going over the hieroglyphs in the hallway leading to the light room when I noticed a pattern. Now, these patterns are very similar to an ancient dialect that was written near Giza and Saqqara, though some records of it also exist in archives pulled from ruins in Memphis. Now, by backtracking and ascribing some of the hieroglyphs that had the same meaning on Earth, I made a rough outline of a translator for the Egyptian here. It's not perfect, and there might be some gaps, especially with some of the more complicated sentences and sentence structures, which is why I came here, where the big and simple sentence was written above the gate an…" the linguist took a pause to remember to inhale at last. Ernest looked up at the hieroglyphs on the beam, he hadn't noticed them before.
"Huh. Didn't see those when I came through, though my helmet might have blocked some of that." he thought aloud.
"Are you kidding? Those were the first things I saw!" the linguist said, thrusting his notepad into Ernest's hands. "That's the translation I've worked out; took a few tries to get it right, though, but I'm sure this is it."
"Thanks …er." Ernest said, looking at the notes.
"Stevens, Robert Stevens!" the linguist said, not looking away from the hieroglyphs.
Looking down, Ernest saw the note, complete with scribbles and struck-through sentences:
The Glorious Summer Palace of Ra! Dominion of Land
Center of Worship, Temple of Ra!
Heliopolis, Land of Ra
Temple of Ra, Heliopolis
Prize of Ra, Heliopolis Tem
Until the final, circled sentence caught his eye:
THE GRAND TEMPLE OF HELIOPOLIS, PRIZE OF THE SUPREME LORD RA
The Castle finally had a name …