Chapter 6

Colorado Springs
15 September 1995

It was over too quickly before Samantha Carter could process everything.

The post-mortem had revealed that Catherine had died of multiple-organ failure, a rare complication of her fall. She had been cremated almost immediately with only a handful of people in attendance, her ashes later scattered from the top of Pikes Peak.

Leaving a will that bestowed most of her possessions to Sam whom she had regarded as a daughter.

She mourned Catherine the same way she had mourned her mother – with a period of physical and emotional distance, away from everyone she knew, away from work, with several long hours spent in bed staring sightlessly at the ceiling, with tears that were more often than not, squeezed back in frustration and anger.

The newfound stability that she'd acquired after moving to Colorado Springs was crumbling, like a carpet that had been roughly tugged from beneath her feet.

Lost and adrift, once more.

It was the unpleasant administrative work that had managed to drag her out of bed. The past two days had been exhausting as she tried to clear Catherine's house alone, refusing the help of several base personnel, readying it for an estate agent's perusal while placing the rest of her items in storage. Deep in her grief, it was only as she was absently thumbing through an archaeological journal that she remembered Catherine did appear to have had some unfinished business with the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

A week ago, Catherine had been with her in the mess hall. A week ago, she had been alive, enthusiastic and eager. What a difference a week could make.

And now she stood in Catherine's house, looking at rest of her personal effects that would be removed by the storage men the day after tomorrow.

The ringing of the phone caused her to jump a little.

"Hello." She couldn't trust herself to say more, not when her emotions were that close to the surface.

"Er, hello. Hi. Could I please speak to Dr. Catherine Langford?" An uncertain male voice sounded over the line.

She sighed. "I'm afraid you're calling a week too late. Dr. Langford died a few days ago."

There was utter silence on the line.

"Hello?"

"Yes! Yes, well…I'm…I'm sorry to hear that…that's certainly unexpected news," the man stammered uncertainly. "I didn't know that –"

"No, of course not. It took us all by surprise too. May I ask who's speaking please?"

"This is Daniel Jackson, er, Dr. Daniel Jackson, from the University of Chicago, the Archaeology Department," the caller said, rushing through his speech as though he was almost afraid that she might hang-up on him. "Well, you see, I met Dr. Langford in New York, and she –"

Daniel Jackson.

The mysterious key to the ongoing puzzle.

"Dr. Jackson, I'm Captain Samantha Carter, one of Catherine's closest friends," she interrupted smoothly. "I would like to meet you, on behalf of Catherine."

"Really? I mean, that'll be great. There're some things that…no, well, I mean," he paused. "Let me try again. Actually, I'm in Colorado Springs, been here since yesterday, hoping to meet Catherine, but I've had quite a hard time trying to contact anyone. But well, your news makes it impossible. I would however, be returning to Chicago tonight –," he rambled on, sounding as though he was afraid that she would hang up on him.

That was perfect.

"In fact, Dr. Jackson, I have some time now. Would you tell me where you are? I could always pick you up and we could go somewhere else," she said, suddenly eager to get the show on the road, the thrill of a potential discovery briefly chasing away the sorrow that had plagued her for the past week.

"Oh, well, that's great! I'm at Travelodge Colorado Springs, it's on Ore Mill –"

"I'll see you in twenty."

She slammed the phone down and ran to her car.

The floppy-haired, bespectacled man who was waiting outside the hotel looked bemused when she pulled up with tyres screeching. He wore a coat that looked several sizes too large for him and a plaid shirt that gave him the air of an intellectual geek who paid the world no heed as it passed him by.

Sam tooted the horn once and waved.

Carrying a number of folders in his hand with a limp canvas messenger slung over his shoulder, Daniel Jackson climbed into her car, bringing a swish of the cold, autumnal air with him.

Still encumbered by his folders and bag, he smiled and held out his hand. "Dr. Daniel Jackson. Pleased to meet you."

She took it, absurdly pleased to find that he had a firm handshake despite what appearances might have alluded to. "Samantha Carter."

They ended up in a little-known café on the outskirts of town, taking a table that was close to the window and the unlikeliest to be disturbed by passing waiters.

Only when their coffees had arrived did she try to break that uncomfortable silence.

"So, Dr. Jackson –"

"Daniel."

"Daniel," she acquiesced. "Only if you call me Sam too."

"Sam," he said with his lips slightly upturned and a rather unnerving gaze in his eyes. "I'm sorry to hear about Dr. Langford. I wish…I wish I could have-" he broke off, waving a hand in regret. "I'm really sorry."

She exhaled sharply. "Yes, me too. So, why did you want to meet her?" The loss of Catherine was still too fresh, too hard to accept.

Seeing his hesitation at her brusque manner, she softened slightly, touching his hand in silent apology.

"Daniel, look, I'm…I'm sorry. It's been a very, very tough time for all of us. Catherine and I are…were colleagues. We were close, and had been for some time. A week ago, she fell from the stairs that led up to her home. Someone found her, barely alive, and got her to the hospital in time. She was placed in intensive care with serious injuries. Just when we all thought that she was going to get better, she took a turn for the worse. Everything went downhill from there…and…the rest…well, you know," she finished lamely, her stomach still clenching at the thought of admitting aloud that Catherine was well and truly gone.

Daniel was silent for a minute, absently tracing the floral pattern on the tablecloth with a finger, contemplating his next words.

"I understand," he said, pausing before giving her a piercing look. "Although I'm not too sure what business an archaeologist like Dr. Langford would have with the Air Force."

"It's classified, sorry," she stated baldly.

He nodded in wry understanding, then ran an absent hand through his long hair.

"I'm a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Chicago's Archaeological department," he began tentatively. "A few months ago, Dr. Langford turned up at a symposium where I was speaking, giving a paper on Ancient Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. It didn't go well," he laughed deprecatingly, humourlessly, recalling how everyone had walked out as he had tried to circle his point on the board. Naïvely, he'd thought there was a free lunch that people were more interested in. "She had a job offer for me. Translation, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs."

To say that Sam was surprised was too mild a reaction. She knew who he was from Catherine's near-illegible scribbles on that post-it, but it seemed that Catherine had gone further than she was probably permitted to, offering a position to another civilian without the express permission of the Air Force.

Or did she?

"I refused," he continued flatly. "It all looked so suspicious to me. I've never heard of her, not even in wider academic circles, even though she had a PhD in Archaeology, didn't see what the Air Force wanted with my archaeological knowledge. After the symposium, I left the building, not having finished even half of my presentation. It was raining and there she was again, in a car. And then she said, 'Dr. Jackson, if you have refused my offer, would you at least take a look at a few hieroglyphics and tell me what they say?'"

So Catherine had indeed gone out of her way to get what she wanted.

"And?" Sam pushed, desperate for answers.

"And she handed me a small sheet of paper. At the time, I didn't think very much about this, even thought that it was some sort of academic test that she was giving me, or that…," he trailed off, shaking his head. "Anyway, I took it, and went back to Chicago, and forgot about it for a week or so. I saw it again when I was cleaning my table, and saw that her translation – or whosever translation it was – had been so badly mangled."

He turned and rummaged through one of his many folders, finally peeling out the same sheet of paper – now worn and torn at the top – along with his translation.

"It's a statement on Ra, I think," he pointed out the glyphs to her. "But even the Ancient Egyptians do try to make sense in their sentences. Here, if you look at this – 'Quebeh', then an adverbial sedjem-en-ef with a cleft subject. Then 'sealed and buried,'" the archaeologist said, using his finger to circle that particular ideogram. "That one there is not 'coffins', but 'for all time'."

She stared at his effortless translations in shock, realising that he had done it, had figured out something that their very best scientists and linguists couldn't do and had even explained it to her in a manner that actually made sense.

Buried in the Giza Plateau.

Not meant to be discovered, for all time.

It was now so obvious, so clear, so…literal.

Sometime in the last few months, Catherine had tried the translations on her own. And succeeded. Daniel Jackson's own analysis was merely her confirmation. But even Catherine couldn't guess the last row of hieroglyphs.

Daniel was still talking, explaining the change of the hieroglyphic structures over time and how he had come to his conclusion. "So put together, it reads like some mystical or ritualistic text," he chuckled, "but we already knew they were superstitious people. Anyway, put together, you would get 'A million years into the sky is Ra, sun god, sealed and buried for all time, his…."

He stopped abruptly, grimacing in apparent discomfiture.

"His what?" She leaned forward, watching the animated movements of his fingers come to a halt.

"Look, this needs some explanation. It's here that I have to say that the last word just makes no sense to me, and that's the thing throwing off this whole translation," he admitted, "it's actually a combination of glyphs in Ancient Egyptian that I saw, which, after several cross-references still didn't seem to exist in the best dictionaries –"

"Daniel!" Sam couldn't help the sharpness that had crept into her voice. "Please, just tell me."

He looked abashed, his face flushing.

"Uh, right," he mumbled, "'Stargate'. 'Sealed and buried for all time, his Stargate.' That's the word, I think," he looked uncomfortably away, looking as though he didn't know what else to say. "Of course, it's possible that in Ancient Egyptian burial myths, the gateway to the stars was only opened to the Ka, that is, the person's soul, in the afterlife and knowing that Ra, being the supreme god in the whole creation myth –"

Sam had stopped listening, feeling as though the wind had been knocked out of her. The grey ring, its alien composition…a gateway to the stars…the Stargate…

God, could it be…?

She forced herself to sit still and stay calm, when all she wanted to do was to rush back to base and cast a fresh eye over the seventh symbol.

Suddenly, Sam understood why Catherine had extended that particular offer to Dr. Daniel Jackson. His intuitive reasoning, his earnestness, his creative energy that she'd gleaned from his conference were exactly what the project – or even Catherine herself – had lacked. Mocked for his outlandish ideas in an unforgiving academic world, he would never know that he was closer to the truth than anyone could have thought. She marvelled at Catherine's wily method at releasing classified information, leaving it to Daniel to think that an amateur had attempted, and failed with the translation.

With a start, she realised that Daniel had fallen silent, watching her curiously.

"Sam?"

"Yeah," she muttered awkwardly, feeling her cheeks flame a dull red for having tuned him out halfway. "Sorry, I lost you there for a while."

He snorted dryly; she hadn't seen the pain briefly flashing across his eyes. "Most people tend to."

She made a show of checking her watch, hoping that he'd get the hint.

Not really. He sat there patiently, his hands still holding the sheet. Time to take the bull by its horns.

"Well, Daniel, do you mind if I took this?" She pointed to the sheet, and he let it go without argument. "Thank you very much, Daniel. I know that Catherine would have appreciated this, even though it well…came too late," she finished awkwardly.

"There's more," Daniel eyed her steadily, daring her to leave her seat.

Holy Hannah.

"More? What you do mean?"

He opened another folder, closed it and opened another, huffing in mild annoyance while he flipped forcefully through its pages until he saw what he wanted.

"Catherine also handed me a series of ancient Semitic writing systems – Akkadian Cuneiform, Babylonian Cuneiform, hypothetical Mesopotamian Neo Aramic, some other forms of hieratic and others….look, I really don't know why she did this," he replied in frustration, turning over the page to her. "Apart from Ancient Egyptian, I'm not that familiar with these glyphs."

Printed neatly on a piece of paper were several sets of vertical ideograms arranged in several columns, each column containing six to seven characters. Sam scanned the unfamiliar symbols until she reached the familiar patterns in the second-last column.

The shapes of the star constellations had been cleverly disguised among the other writings as another obscure Middle-Eastern language, decontextualised and their combinations scrambled so that Dr. Jackson would not recognise them as anything else other than glyphs.

"So what did you find?" It took an effort to force her voice into a semblance of calm interest.

"Nothing, actually," Daniel replied apologetically, frowning at the patterns once more. "They don't really make any sense in that particular order. I actually completed a search of cuneiform and other pre-dynastic hieroglyphics. No matches whatsoever. I've exhausted all reference material against all known writing samples from the period pre- and post-….and nothing. Although," he continued eagerly, and pointed at a peculiar symbol of two praying figures in front of a pyramid. "That one looks out of place."

"Out of place?"

"Yes," he confirmed, "that looks more like a prayer drawing in Ancient Egyptian, a graphic description if you like, of the landscape in the moonlight and maybe their rituals …look, you can actually see the funny little line and circle coming out of the top."

Their gazes locked; his showed befuddlement and hers, dawning awareness.

The seventh, odd glyph that stood outside the cartouche. Landscape. The circle. The moonlight…or was it the moon? Kneeling figures. The disparate pictures clashed and swirled in her head. She froze at what he had unwittingly revealed.

That was it – she just had to go.

"Could I have this too?" She held the paper in a tight grip.

He nodded earnestly. "Oh, right, of course, you can have it. It's yours."

Sam stood immediately, accidentally hitting the table on her sudden way up, feeling the rush of adrenaline through her veins, a thrilling, prickly wash of exhilaration that caused her to breathe faster and her head to swim.

"Daniel, I really, really have to go. You probably this is odd, but well, it isn't. Thank you so, so much for what you've done. And," she hesitated to add, "I'm sure that Catherine would have felt the same way."

Remembering ashamedly that she hadn't exactly shown very good manners to him the whole time, the least she could do was to offer him a lift back after nearly dragging him out of Colorado Springs.

"Need a ride back?"

"Er…no, not really. I could just call a cab," he said in bewilderment, having also stood up in mild alarm upon seeing her rather violent reaction to his revelation of what he didn't know. "You sure you don't want to know about the stories surrounding the glyphs?"

But she was already halfway out the door, waving her hurried goodbye. Or was that her gesture of refusal?

Daniel Jackson watched her leave, his brow furrowed in thought and sat down again, slowly gathering his folders into a semblance of order. Running through the entire conversation in his mind, he realised that it was him – in his excitement – who had done most of the talking and Samantha Carter, a whole lot of listening. Her reactions had seemed out of proportion to what he had said, and he was under no illusions that it had meant a lot more to her than what she was willing to reveal.

It was best to let sleeping dogs lie, he decided and pulled out his wallet.

And time to return to Chicago.

He signalled the waitress and got her to call a cab.