Chapter 3

"Have you ever seen a dais like this before?" Carter was asking Teal'c as Jacob and Quinn caught up.

"I have not, Major Carter" The Jaffa was circling the Stargate tensely, his jaw tight and eyes narrowed.

"Those holes look like they were made deliberately" Quinn mused thoughtfully, dropping to one knee for a closer look.

Carter nodded absently as she crouched down next to him and began delving into her backpack. The dais looked like it was made of naquadah and formed a perfect circle around the Stargate. Set a foot in from the edge, were a series of indentations, circling all the way around the dais, of various depths and sizes and each one looked as though it was lined with metals of different kinds. Some had decoration - a single geometric pattern at the base, or a group of four fish spiralling into the centre, others had no obvious decoration at all. The only thing these odd indentations had in common was a single raised bubble of metal in the very centre of their bases.

Quinn looked up at Teal'c and Jacob as Carter began scanning the dais. "You've never seen anything like this before?"

Teal'c raised an eyebrow, having already answered that. Jacob shook his head. "Anise called these marks "bowls" for want of a better word" he said "But none of them had any idea of what the purpose of this dais was for. It could be some kind of decoration or for holding food and drink offerings to any gods the people who once lived here believed in."

Quinn rose and walked around the dais until he was directly in front of the Stargate. "That's something else" he pointed to the indentations in front of him. There were two, and neither was bowl-shaped. Teal'c and Jacob joined him, studying their elongated, shallow forms silently.

"The top looks almost like an ankh" Quinn commented.

"It's a little distorted" Jacob replied dubiously.

"Wow!"

The three turned quickly as Carter rose and moved around the dais towards them. She stared at their questioning expressions for a moment, then looked back down at her palm as if to confirm something she couldn't believe. "There's naquadria in this dais"

"Really?" Quinn looked back at the dais with renewed interest and missed the frown that skipped across Jacob's features.

"You are certain of this?" Selmak asked immediately.

"Yeah. It's naquadria alright" she looked up into her father's face, finding only the symbiote's puzzlement. "I take it you haven't heard of naquadria being used in Stargate design before?"

"I have not" Selmak contemplated her for a moment, then lifted his head and scanned the area for a moment. "The Tok'ra here did not speak of naquadria being present either."

Her lips twisted slightly. "Well, it's definitely naquadria"

"Maybe the Tok'ra didn't get around to looking that closely at the Stargate" Quinn offered. "You said yourself that the Stargate had no DHD. Maybe they decided checking the materials it was made of wasn't as important as the buildings."

"Perhaps" Selmak was looking slightly unsettled. Carter frowned. She was used to seeing her father become jumpy but Selmak was usually a lot calmer.

"This indentation is unique" Teal'c completed another circuit of the dais and stopped beside them to glance at Quinn's distorted ankh. "There are no symbols or writings on this device. The symbols on the Stargate are unfamiliar to me"

"All of them?" Carter stepped up onto the dais to take a closer look. Her eyes widened as she studied the outer track.

"Maybe the local constellations?" Quinn was looking at the other side of the track.

"Anise's report indicated these did not represent local constellations" Selmak stepped up to join them, taking a closer look himself. "She concluded they were geometric abstractions but was unable to discover of what"

"Without a frame of reference, we might not be able to" Carter said, stepping back a single pace. "Geometric representations usually require some kind of cultural context for interpretation. We've found nothing in the temple ruins that could help us translate them"

Selmak nodded once. "That is indeed the problem the Tok'ra have encountered"

~Carter, come in~

She started as her radio crackled into life and grabbed it. "Go ahead, sir"

~We've got company, get everyone up here!~

"We're on our way, sir" she dropped her radio and nodded to Teal'c who was immediately turning to stare suspiciously back up the road they had come.

Jacob scanned the mountainside until he spotted O'Neill gesture and duck behind some rocks. "There!" he said, leading the others up the steep slope to join him. When they arrived, O'Neill pointed grimly in the direction they had originally come from and handed his binoculars to the Tok'ra.

"I'm counting twenty Jaffa" Carter muttered, scanning the area herself. "Can you tell who they serve?"

"Not yet" Jacob replied tersely. "Where the hell did they come from?"

"There's an al'kesh just beyond those trees to the left. They haven't seen our ship yet but it's only a matter of time" O'Neill replied. "There's a hell of a lot more Jaffa than twenty but most of them are staying in the trees."

"They look like they're making themselves at home, sir" Carter added, changing her field of view to include the tree line.

"Can we make it back to the ship?" Quinn asked.

"No" O'Neill said shortly. "They'll see us the minute we leave the temple"

"Then I'd say we have a problem" Jacob said dryly, handing the binoculars to Teal'c.

"Ya think?"

"We need to find somewhere defensible" Jacob turned to look across the mountainside, searching with his eyes for something appropriate. Aside from the slope they were currently hiding on, the plateau stood alone. A sheer drop on two sides plummeted hundreds, maybe thousands of feet downward into a valley that was crested by towering mountains on the other side. The short hill they had crested to find the temple led down a rocky slope to the tel'tak they had travelled in and in the distance beyond that was the tree line and the Jaffa.

Teal'c lowered the binoculars and returned them to O'Neill. "Jacob Carter, I believe there is a trail above us we can use. It will allow us to travel around the Jaffa and take refuge in the mountains. If we move with caution they will not be alerted to our presence"

"Is there anything in the ship that will identify who we are?" The Colonel asked.

"No. We took everything with us and the computer doesn't carry any more information than we needed to get here" Jacob responded. "They'll know someone's on the planet, but they won't know who. Hopefully, they'll think it's just more Jaffa"

"It'll give us time" O'Neill rose. "Teal'c, take point" he waited for Teal'c to begin climbing to the trail and the others to fall into step, then brought up the rear just behind Quinn, making sure their passage left as little to find as possible.