AN: Thank you to those reading and reviewing! Mostly questions about Daniel's uncle, Liam. Yes, his connection to the unique stones will be seen as well as the idea that there may be more of them and that they serve a purpose.

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Part 1 - ARC OF LIGHT

Chapter 1 - Evacuate Now or Get Trampled.

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"It's okay, Daniel. We'll just have to re-input current configurations to a greater degree of detection. There is no way of knowing how many planets we could have missed. Apparently the pre-calculated stellar drift is more prominent than we first thought."

"What happened to the program that you were going to write to digitally compensate for this eventuality, Sam?"

"That's the one, well, still on the drawing board. Sorry."

"Then there… you mean, we could be dropping others?"

Before Carter could open her mouth, O'Neill declared, "Of course we could, Daniel. Drop one planet by the wayside, you drop another. That's, er, Murphy's Law… I think."

"Go through the wormhole on a sunny day, it's raining on the planet. That's Murphy's Law, Jack. The law of irony in often physically comical manifestation."

"Physically comical, huh?"

The four of them stood together on the incline of the gate's ramp, pausing a few feet from the large, encircled wall of shimmering blue.

"Okay, kids. Last minute check," O'Neill ordered, hefting his weapon to make sure the loaded cartridge was locked in place. "Carter, check for power readings; Daniel, if you use the gun, try not to drop it in the dirt this time. It tends to make the ordinance people rather unhappy."

"Oh, well, ordinance people aren't bullied about by colonels into towing around several hundred pounds of weighted metal strapped to their hips," Daniel mumbled, glancing woefully at his holstered sidearm.

"What?"

Daniel's head popped up at an angle, guileless brows leaping into the uneven sandy-gold fringe. "What?"

Jack stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head. How was it possible for a grown man to look that innocent? No one past the age of six was suppose to manage that. Yet, Daniel, from the day he'd met him, had his deceptive act down to a science.

"This is odd. I'm not reading anything now," Carter remarked, frowning as she adjusted the small handheld device. "I don't understand this, sir. Less than twenty minutes ago it was spiking right off the graph. Now nothing."

O'Neill glanced over his shoulder at the woman in mild annoyance. "Maybe you need a bigger antenna or whatever it is that picks up those lower signals."

"Perhaps you are referring to an emissions booster, O'Neill." Teal'c peered curiously over Carter's head at the dormant device in her hand.

A few steps in front, Daniel tried to snatch his boonie hat from the low hip pocket of his BDUs where he usually stuffed it. As it frequently did, the rope snagged on the pistol to entangle itself with the holster. With an exasperated groan, he twisted the mangled hat free and started to turn toward the others. At that instant, something flashed an eerie pale green at the corner of his vision. Daniel's head snapped up quickly, startled to see that the towering circular spectrum of the event horizon had an outlying green tinge to it arcing toward the top.

"Look at that!" he gaped, shading his eyes with his sleeve, unaware of dropping his hat on the ramp. "It's incredible!! Are you seeing…!? Heeey, Jack? Did you, did you see what I just--?" He swung around anxiously to find all three teammates staring at him skeptically. He pursed his lips and glanced back over his shoulder. Sure enough, the entire event horizon shone a mocking luminous blue.

Jack scowled at him. "Clean your glasses, Daniel. There's nothing there. And there's nothing here." He tossed a negligent thumb in the direction of Carter's handheld device.

Sam spared the colonel a hard look, resenting the dismissal. However, she tried to offer a smile to her younger teammate. "Sometimes the lights reflect… things that aren't there, per se."

"What?" Daniel bent to grab his hat, wide blue eyes still fixed on Sam's face as he straightened again. "I do know the difference," he huffed. She shrugged and went through the event horizon behind O'Neill.

"That was not a reflection," he insisted. When Teal'c didn't comment, Daniel sulkily jammed on his hat to follow the Jaffa into the wormhole. He hesitated, unable to stop himself from looking up. Nothing. Puzzled, he went through, almost bumping into Carter on the other side as she stood stiffly on the steps.

"Sam?"

The colonel stood in the middle of a huge red-brown field. A dust-dry, flat, barren field. No people. No houses. No animals. No trees or grass. "Well, I think it's pretty safe to say we could have left this one lost," he yelled across the open space. Teal'c nodded in solemn agreement standing next to a perplexed Carter.

Sam wasn't ready to leave yet. With a last uncertain look around, she came down off the steps and went to one knee to feel the ground. "I have to get samples of this orange dirt," she declared. "I'm no agriculturist but it doesn't look these fields have been plowed in years. How can that be?"

"Because there's nobody here to plow them?" O'Neill snapped, walking briskly across the field to rejoin his team. "I'm guessing, Carter, that your little power spikes were just more computer glitches and the MALP got its wires crossed with another planet with a civilization."

Carter remained baffled. "I still need to get dirt samples, sir."

"Fine. Get Daniel to help you. This is as close as he's gonna get to his rocks this trip."

"Yes, sir." Carter unloaded her backpack and rummaged inside for the small sample vials she habitually took into the field. The ground was fairly hard, but she managed to gouge a few dents in it with her boot heel. She had both hands filled with the grainy orange substance when she heard a muted beeping.

"MajorCarter, your… upper front seems to be making an oddly disharmonic noise."

Carter blinked. The handheld device in her breast pocket beeped again before she could drop the dirt. "Uh, thanks."

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TBC