Chapter 3
Cheyenne Mountain Complex
Colorado Springs
9 September 1995
Deep in the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Captain Samantha Carter sat in her laboratory perusing her folder containing all the details of a giant, grey ring that stood in the middle of a three-storey high space. She debated going into the commissary to get yet another steaming cup of coffee, but decided against it, tired of its less-than stellar brew.
Academic books and publications on astrophysics and wormhole theory littered the workbench haphazardly as a computer blinked its findings on the stellar structures of the Milky Way and Earth's atmospheric readings every hour. The inch-thick stack of printouts sat on her desk next to her to which she returned to ruffle through approximately every twenty minutes. On the left, a pile of reports from her science and technical team grew by the hour.
She rubbed her tired eyes and took a sip from her now-lukewarm cup of coffee, secretly wishing that she had listened to General West's stern advice to leave the mountain for at least three days.
"Sam?" A soft voice floated through her exhaustion.
She looked up abruptly and winced immediately, knowing what was coming.
"I thought I said that I didn't want to see you here until Monday."
"Catherine, I know, but I…," she faltered, not knowing how to continue without embarrassing herself. "I just thought I couldn't just go back, not when there's so much more to do here than at home anyway," Sam finished lamely, praying that this line of conversation would end there. She winced, then thought that perhaps a more offensive approach would work better. "You're still here yourself, Catherine."
Dr. Catherine Langford stood at the threshold of the lab, her white hair contrasting starkly with an all-black get-up. She cut a striking figure despite her advanced years; there was a maternal strength that shone in her eyes when she regarded the younger woman and a equal hardness that emerged when she fought against several military decisions that she felt were detrimental to her research.
"Samantha." Just that single word was enough to make her cave.
"Look, Catherine," she feebly compromised. "I promise I'll go as soon as this latest reading is printed and filed."
Catherine stood her ground, contemplating the younger woman before her. "I'm just going to the commissary for a drink. Would you like to come with me?" There was something in her voice that warned Sam not to decline that invitation.
She considered Catherine's suggestion or rather, her veiled order. Before she knew it, she was rounding the lab table and strolling to the mess hall with her mentor eagerly in search of blue jello.
They took a table in the far end of the dining hall that gave them a modicum of privacy, even though there was very little competition for tables at 0515hrs.
Only when they had taken a few sips of their steaming drinks did she muster the energy to speak again.
"I've found something, you know," Sam revealed tiredly.
Catherine sat up suddenly, her posture ramrod straight.
Sam gave a short, sharp laugh. "Before you ask, no, it's nothing really related to the dialling program. Or that huge grey hunk of a metal ring."
Catherine glared at her. "God, Samantha, that was –"
She grinned briefly at that deliberate deception and continued, "We have a record of atmospheric readings and non-ionising radiation samples for a period of six to eight months now. I've tried refining the data to separate the frequencies by which they come through while keeping in mind electron excitation, and correlated them with certain energy signatures in deep space – or at least within the surroundings of Earth and the moon."
Catherine grimaced into her tea, glancing at her watch for good measure. "Sam, I'm not going to pretend I understood everything."
Sam tried again, wondering if the scientific explanation was testing the older woman's patience. "Essentially, there has been a short-term increase in zodiacal light in the past couple of months or so at random periods of time…it's actually a kind of luminous emittance caused by the interstellar dust that drifts by the Earth's exosphere. Normally, it's so faint that the naked eye can't see it, especially with the amount of light pollution. This time, the emittance has spiked through the charts at least a few times in the past months. I'm surprised no one else noticed the increase. But then again, I only realised because I looked through the details of the printouts earlier."
"Is this unusual?" Catherine turned concerned eyes to her.
"Yes, no, I don't really know," she heaved a frustrated sigh. "I've asked for several close-ups of the exosphere from NASA, but there's been nothing yet. That being said, the channels of communication between us and NASA could be better, I think."
"What does this mean for us?" Catherine looked at the weariness that had replaced the excitement in Sam's eyes, and not for the hundredth time, wished that the young woman would spare a care for herself more often.
Life hadn't gone too well for this particular Carter, having lost her mother so long. After that, it had been college, grants, early graduation, back to college and then getting into the military for a reason she never did quite understand. Samantha Carter had told her that much, and only under the influence of copious amounts of alcohol on one of their rare nights out.
Sam sighed and poked at her blue jello. "I'm not too sure. Now that we've sort of forged a closer working relationship with NASA, I've been receiving several data bursts from them about the anomalies in the atmosphere that their satellite and their ships have captured. We've got snapshots of the galaxy that NASA has sent us, but these don't look any more unusual than the ones we've received in the past. But I'm dealing only with data and no visuals, so there's not much to go on with here."
"What about asking your research team to look a little deeper into it?" Catherine suggested.
The fork speared a blue square, then moved the wobbly piece around the circumference of the glass bowl.
"You've got no argument from me there. But we really don't have much to go on. And not many of them are that hung up on a side project that doesn't seem to lead to a place of scientific worth. They're convinced that anomalies happen when volatile meteoric substances react in the mesosphere, the results of which could be a cause of this phenomenon," Sam replied wearily as she finally took a mouthful of the jello.
"You'll get it. You always do," Catherine replied feelingly as she took a sip of her drink. She had no doubts of her own that Samantha Carter would always come through. That the strength of character and the persistent stubbornness that she had probably inherited from her father would see to it. Her regular tendency to break into long scientific explanations that most people wouldn't understand was a trait that Catherine found more endearing than annoying, and she was used to the near-manic obsession with work that Sam displayed with alarming regularity.
"Thanks for that vote of confidence, Catherine," Sam smiled wryly. "I've yet to go through the data that we've collected from the past year, in fact, I'm not even sure if there's any national record of such readings that date back, what is it? Twenty years? Fifty years? Even so, I don't know where to take this, because it could just be remnants of light particles that react in a certain way that we don't know about."
"I'd like to tell you that it'll sort itself out, but things here don't exactly work the way we want them to," Catherine reminded her.
"Yeah, I know. The perks of working in a top-secret base, huh?"
For several minutes, they sat there, cradling their own cups, lost in their own thoughts as the minutes ticked by to signal the coming new day of work. Not that it made a difference deep underground, where the lack of natural light and recycled air tended to wreak havoc with sleep patterns, eliminating the boundaries between work and time-off.
For all the progress that had been made on the grey ring that stood majestically in front of the briefing room's glass windows, the final breakthrough – the discovery of the seventh symbol needed to activate the orifice – seemed elusive just when they'd appeared to be on the verge of history in the making.
It was another thing to be glum about.
"Will you be letting General West know of these findings?"
"I'd like to do a bit more research first. If something more concrete comes up, you know I'll be the first one knocking on his door," she told the older woman, stifling a yawn behind a cupped hand.
"Well," Catherine finally stood up. "I think it's time for some rest. You too, Sam."
That tone brooked no argument. But she thought she'd try anyway.
"I will. As soon as I –" she bit back her next words contritely upon seeing Catherine's disapproving glare. "I think I'll be heading back to my quarters."
"I'll hold you to that."
It was a good thing that she didn't always keep her promises, well, not immediately, she thought as she watched Catherine walk out of the mess hall. She stood up and headed to her own lab a few floors down, carrying a fresh cup of takeaway coffee.
The sheer excitement that had initially overtaken her upon signing the non-disclosure contract had faded into a lingering awe, the science of which had overwhelmed her and sent her brain into overload. But it was also a project that was too big for her to screw up, all too important for her career and an entire dream come true ever since she had stepped foot into college declaring Physics and Engineering as her double majors.
Leaving the Pentagon where she had been studying the theoretical physics of wormholes for this particular assignment was actually more than a dream come true. It offered her a blank slate professionally and personally and she had never been more grateful for the timing of her transfer.
And it had done her worlds of good.
Free from the ever-hanging shadow of General Jacob Carter's own ambitions for his daughter and from the unpleasant, controlling and occasionally-abusive behaviour of a very forgettable ex-fiancé, her weekends and time-off – should she wish to take them – were finally, finally her own with which to do as she pleased once more.
What she had not expected was the burgeoning friendship between her and Dr. Catherine Langford, the civilian leader who oversaw the running of the project alongside the Air Force's military presence in this endeavour. If she had hugely admired Catherine's contribution to science and archaeology, she was largely unprepared for the spontaneous downtime dinners – albeit mostly taken in the mess hall – and the easy camaraderie that had developed between them; these unofficial meetings had only served to strengthen what was fast turning into a surrogate mother-daughter relationship. Catherine had partially filled a void that her own mother had left so long ago, and it was only now that she realised how much she could have relied on a maternal guiding hand as she had been struggling through the social-awkwardness and the emotional vicissitudes of teenagehood.
And now the mystery of the grey ring had consumed her life for years – honestly speaking, it was quite literally also Catherine's entire life as well – and she wasn't about to give up on it, not when they were so close to starting another chapter in mankind's history.
Unknowingly, her feet had taken her to another research lab that housed the cover stones. She eyed the millennia-old rock that hung in that two-storey storage space, chipped and worn off in parts, but sufficiently intact for anyone to make out a visible line of hieroglyphics carved into its inner track.
Time million sky/ Ra Sun God/coffin forever to eternity/Door to heaven
Those phrases didn't really make any sense.
But those word fragments had at that time, seemed so arcane, so extraordinary that she'd committed it to memory the first time she saw it.
The multiple erasures of the translation on the blackboard were testament enough to the frustration of the academics who still struggled with the inflexions and declensions of a long-extinct language. She had forgotten how often it had led to many arguments that had begun with several differing interpretations of the nuances, thereafter straying into Egyptian funerary rites, their religious beliefs and the function of the pyramids.
Catherine had said that she had spent hours poring over her father's notes. Not that they had helped much, seeing as the imprinted language was a mix of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and…something else. Some sort of writing that hadn't really matched the script of the early proto-languages. There was something indecipherable in their order or in the ideograms that had thrown her off. When her father had discovered it in the sands of the Giza Plateau in 1928, she had said that he had been convinced that ancient Egyptian culture was a lot more advanced than most people believed it to be.
He was partially proven right when Catherine's continuing work after the war proved that the other form of writings were in fact, unique glyphs that traced the shapes of several constellations in the Milky Way.
Six symbols on the cartouche, six star constellations.
Surely the Egyptians hadn't been hung up on the night sky for the sake of stargazing, or at least not hung up enough to insert the patterns of the stars on a mysterious cover stone.
It had to have some other meaning that still eluded all of them.
The clear night sky had shimmered with the brightness of celestial bodies on her recent solo camping trip in the Colorado mountains, bringing to memory the patterns of the stars whose names were born out of the sensibilities of the ancient imagination.
The Ancient Egyptians had done the same thing. They had seen patterns in the heavens that resembled people, animals or common objects, joining the dots in a unique order until a particular pattern emerged, forming a picture that told a story.
Or could it have had a more prosaic purpose…to record…an address of sorts?
Sam hadn't realised that she had started running to her lab, still holding the long-forgotten cup of coffee in her left hand. She picked up the duster, hurriedly erasing three-quarters of her mathematical calculations on the white board before sketching out a three-dimensional cube and marking a position in its centre.
An address.
A destination.
Six points to determine a location anywhere within the cube.
She dotted the centre of each surface, and drew lines through them, watching them converge in the centre of the three-dimensional space.
But to reach that three-dimensional space…did it mean…?
Tentatively, her shaking hand extended the line from the middle of the cube to the centre of the board, repeatedly marking the end of her line with a small 'x'.
Her cup of coffee made contact with the floor, the styrofoam cup forgotten in her shock, spreading brown rivulets on the concrete like the spread of a river's tributaries.
The dark liquid splattered her shoes and the lower part of her pants, thankfully missing her numerous stacks of folders. It was entirely possible that she didn't notice the wetness nor the heat from the scalding coffee.
Six points in a three-dimensional space to determine an exact location, a destination in space…but to get there, a seventh point was needed – the seventh point that would outline a course to a position from Earth….
And there it was.
The point of origin.