Chapter 14
"Have you seen Daniel?" asked Sam when she ran into Jack in the corridor.
"No. Have you tried the nutty professor's office?" Jack had his ususal lazy tone of slight sarcasm.
Sam smirked. They all spent time around Noli but Daniel seemed to have made himself especially comfortable in her room. Her desk was starting to litter up with archaeological reference books and pieces on astro physics alike.
"I did actually. No one was there."
Jack took on a doubtful expression.
"See, I don't know why he keeps hanging around there so much. I thought he liked it in dusty caves, like his room."
"The lighting's better", said a voice coming from behind.
"Plus there's music, and entertainment", added another humorously. Jack turned around and met the innocent looks of Noli and Daniel returning from the comissary. He gave Noli's chest an appreciative glance - not, as Sam suspected, to the protruding roundness underneath her shirt, but to the bold letters spelling out "98% CHIMP" on top of it.
"Entertainment, huh..." Jacks jaw moved to the side in a precaurious expression.
"Yeah, just look at me", said Noli and gestured to her face. "Anyway Sam, I was thinking we should have another look at the naquadah battery. I've had a 'vision'." She her opened her eyes wide and spread her fingers on the last word.
"By the way", said Jack, sounding insulted, "Speaking about electrical stuff, there is no way that tamalin creature could take a grown human. I mean I took a shock from one and it wasn't that bad."
"But like I said, it would if it was a little bigger and you weren't grounded", argued Noli. Apparantly, this was something they had been discussing earlier. Sam rolled her eyes when it seemed like the discussion was about to continue.
"Actually, Sir, the fully grown tamalin male can be twice as big as a young female, so it could go either way. You both win."
Noli looked at Jack.
"That means we both come in second."
Jack immediatly got the drift and they chanted "We're number two! We're number two!" in an obscure reference to a Simpsons episode, generating apprehensive glances from the others. Daniel decided to ignore them and turned to Sam.
"So, anyway, you were looking for me?"
Sam was greatful to regain some professional focus.
"Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about the device from PX3-110. I think I might have something."
They had been working on the mysterious finding off and on since its discovery, but it seemed something more urgent was always getting in the way. The failure to make out its function or meaning placed it low on the priority scale, but Sam's curiosity couldn't let it go to be forgotten in a storage room and now it seemed she had finally made a discovery.
"Alright, well, let's go. Noli, you wanna come with?"
"Nah, I need some alone time with the brownie..." Noli held up a carefully wrapped little package. "I'll be by later about the battery", she said to Sam. Sam's gaze had locked on the package.
"They have brownies in the cafeteria?" Noli confirmed with an extatic "M-hmm".
"They're good", added Daniel who had already had his. Jack rolled his eyes at the water he was sure was forming in Sam's mouth.
"I'll save you one. Now go get some work done, kids." They parted and Noli stuck her arm under Jack's, and kept all seriousity in her face as she went:
"Come on Jack, let's go sell counterfeit jeans out of the garage."
"Hah."
Jack kept a straight face but was, secretly, a little giddy to have someone to share Simpsons jokes with. He accompanied Noli to her office, slumped down in the extra seat and spun it around a couple of times while Noli ceremoniously dug into the big chunk of chocolate pastry. She always seemed to be eating something. Candy bars, nuts, fruit. She would devour an apple leaving nothing but the little twig. And yet she never skipped lunch. Jack waved towards the brownie.
"Don't you ever get full? Where does it all go?"
Noli smiled, munching on the delicious mouthful.
"My brain eats it. It probably uses up half of my energy intake."
Jack was a little surprised that Noli never seemed to take clumsy remarks like that the wrong way, like most other women would. Making a reference to someone's weight, be it in essence complimentary, he knew was a minefield. It was as if she actually understood he didn't mean any offence.
"Yeah, I get that too", he answered, pretending to have just as much supernatural brain activity craving energy all the time as she. Noli smirked.
"I'm sure you do", she said, convinced there was a lot more going on inside Jack's head than one would imagine on first impression. Much like with herself. She had often found herself restraining from acting quite as silly around work as her inclination would have her, making jokes or expressing too much excitement over something intriguing, as it always made her colleagues refuse to take her seriously. But not here. Of course she generated her share of amused glances but she didn't have to care, because they didn't mean people listened to her less.
"Little to do today?" she asked Jack in between bites. He was studying the ceiling.
"Paper work", he said with a tone of contempt. Noli made a sympathetic grunt. She contemplated something for a second, then said secretly:
"There's something among these shelves that I think you'd like, my friend."
Jack glanced apprehensively around the room.
"Yeah?"
"Go hunt for treasure."
--
"So, seriously, why do you keep hanging around in Noli's office?" Sam teased. Daniel winced.
"Like I said, the lighting's better..." He then relaxed. "I don't know, it's just... comfortable in there."
"So it has nothing to do with staring across a pile of books into those mysterious emerald eyes..."
"No!"
Actually, they were more of an undefinable grayish green that changed with the light and angle, but Daniel wasn't going to give Sam the satisfaction of correcting her. There was no clearly defined answer to Sam's question, but at least he knew it wasn't about physical attraction. Somehow being around Noli was just relaxing, making it easy to concentrate. In reality, once he had adapted to the persistent background noises of music and crunchy snacks, sitting in his own quiet office felt lonely. It was always nice talking to Noli, and he liked when she made little linguistic jokes or references to songs he knew he would probably be the only one to get. Combined with the way she would call him sweetheart – in various languages, turkish being his personal favourite – and casually touch him in friendly ways it just made him feel exclusive. Appreciated. With Friend. He knew she had relationships like that with the others as well, the incomprehensible word exchange with Jack before they parted was just another example, but the fact that they were all different left no room for jealousy .
"Besides, you spend more time with her than any of us", Daniel continued to defend himself.
"True."
They entered the lab and Sam showed him what she had been talking about. Noli had been right, it had been easy to get the surrounding mineral off the device, and now it was sitting on a table with measuring equipment and tools around it.
"I haven't been getting any readings off it, so either the energy source is exhausted or missing. If we could just figure out what it's meant to do I could hook it up to an external source." Sam was frowning at the device.
"Noli never figured out what it was for either?"
"No... She said she couldn't do it with something that's 'completely unknown to her conceptual world'".
A smile flashed across Daniel's lips. Sounded like her alright.
"But take a look at this."
There was an irregular gathering of vertical stems and plates inside the open construction, some of which bore finely carved writing, letters that had taken Daniel weeks to unsuccessfully dechifre. Sam was pointing at a few dents in the plates.
"I thought it might have been damaged at first, but it didn't seem right because the insides should have been pretty well protected. These dents must be part of the construction. They're completely symmetrical, but different in size and depth, and the alloy at the bottom is different than the surrounding metal - almost like the plugin for a battery. And then I thought about the writing that you haven't been able to translate - you said it felt like there were parts missing?"
Daniel leant down and squinted his eyes, looking at the anonymous dents and the by now frustratingly familiar gibberish.
"Yeah, the sentences seem to be made up of random words... This one starts "Great power" and then goes on "Twin of death"... if these words are actually part of the same sentence at all. It's a bit hard to tell when they're spread out like this."
"That's the thing. What if there actually are parts missing? Something that fits in here like a piece of a puzzle. Maybe you have to put it together with another device to make it work."
"Yeah..." Daniel stared thoughtfully at the device. "But this was the only one they found."
--
"That is one big stash of Mad Magazines", called Jack from the back shelves in Noli's office and made himself comfortable. He had only dug through a couple of issues when the activation alert went off. He winced internally, nodded to Noli and dashed for the gate room.
The research team assigned to explore the surface of PX3-113 had returned a bit ahead of schedule and their excited leader was now talking to Daniel.
"Jack!" called Daniel, "Apparently they were looking in all the wrong places the last time. Tell him, Conrad!"
The man in charge of the mission was one of the people who thrived better doing the kind of dusty archaeological work Daniel was in charge of than dealing with the military aspects of his job. Faced with the ever-bored Colonel O'Neill he looked nervous, but couldn't contain his excitement and studdered that they had come across a large number of fake rocks similar to the one brought back from PX3-110 two months earlier.
"Jack, do you know what this means?", said Daniel.
Jack stared blankly at him.
"It means that there was communication between these two planets."
Jack kept staring.
"We still don't know who made them or what the machines were for. Now we can figure it out."
No answer.
"Jack, we have to go back."
Jack gave it two more seconds, then said: "Why?" and enjoyed the frustration building up in Daniel.
"Because it's intriguing!" he managed to blurt out. He breathed and added, more calculating: "Besides, it might be a weapon of some sort."
"Don't sweat it, Danny, I'm just yanking your chain. When will you be ready to go?"
Daniel ground his teeth for a second, then let it go and started calibrating. "Well, the question is if we should go back to PX3-110 ourselves and search for more of these... rocks, and let Conrad and his team extract the ones on PX3-113...."
"You said there was a lot of them?" Jack interrupted him. Conrad, who had been following their discussion with a look of uncertainty, nodded. Daniel continued:
"I've had little luck translating the writing on the device we've got, it's really irregular. In fact it looks like some sort of code that probably can't be broken without the addition of another... It coincides with the idea Sam has, that they fit together like pieces of a puzzle. "
"So there's a ton of rocks, that look like they might have some doohickey inside of them, but we don't know which ones do and which ones don't, and if they do have something inside we don't know what's going to happen if we crack 'em open."
"We'd have to x-ray them first..." said Conrad.
"Yeah, but we can't haul all that rock through the gate, we'd have to set up an x-ray machine at the site..." As he spoke the words Daniel was already searching for a simpler way to get it done.
"Or..." Jack encouraged him.
"Or, we could just... bring the lightweight x-ray that walks and talks?"
"I'm sure she'd love that." Jack patted Daniel on the shoulder and headed for the door. Daniel followed, leaving Conrad to wonder what new and improved x-ray machine they were talking about that no one had told him about.
Daniel headed for his favourite office. From the music streaming out of the open door he drew that Noli was in, but not terribly occupied. Having been exposed to her habits for quite some time now, he had started to recognise the pattern in which the music Noli played related to her mood - it was subtle and she probably didn't give it any thought herself, but it was there - and sometimes Daniel would try to guess what she was feeling at the moment based on what they were listening to. This time he was right: he found her on the floor with a large sheet of blueprint paper covering her face, rocking her foot to the rythm of an old Madonna hit. As he stepped closer she stopped the motion, raised a finger in the air as if asking him to wait, then pointed it at him and said: "Daniel!"
He crouched down beside her with a smile.
"How did you know it was me?" he asked.
Noli pulled the paper from her face, revealing a grin.
"Your shoes."
"My shoes."
"You've had a pebble stuck under the right one for weeks."
"You felt my shoes through the floor. That's... disturbing."
Noli raised herself on her elbows.
"I know!" she agreed, highly pleased. "I've gotten much faster than I used to be, especially after I learned the floor, I can almost just skip through it. It's like working in this place has allowed me to develop my potential." She layed back down and closed her eyes. "It's fabulous."
On a whim Daniel layed down beside her. It felt a bit odd, but wasn't completely uncomfortable stretching out on the thick rug. He rested his head on his arms and relaxed. Noli rolled over on her side and studied him.
"How you doing then, sugar?"
Daniel drew a deep breath and slowly let it out, enjoying the few seconds pause it granted him in his busy day.
"Oh, I'm doing swell. My soil analyses got lost somewhere on the way from one room to another, three people called in sick this morning. And the coffee machine is broken."
"Aw. And on the bright side?"
"Yeah, actually, I came to talk to you about something. You know the machine from PX3-110?"
"Yeah, did you sort out the writings yet?"
"No, they've been a bit complicated and I think I just found out why: They've found what is believed to be the same kind of camouflaged devices on another planet, only there's several dozens of them, sitting in an underground cave system. And we can't just start cracking them open since we have no idea if what's inside is harmless or not. So, instead of bringing them all here, since they're so many, or bringing an x-ray machine to the planet to go through them all, which would also be a hassle, we were thinking... if you don't mind..."
Noli's eyes were gleaming.
"You mean I can go off-world? I can go through the gate?"
Daniel looked at her and tried to surpress an amused smile.
"There comes more after that but yeah, you get to go through the gate." He added: "We need you."
Noli resisted an urge to pounce on Daniel and settled for clapping her hands and throwing her arms victoriously in the air. She had all but given up hope on ever getting to travel through a wormhole herself, and suddenly the opportunity presented itself. It would add a wonderful aspect to her knowledge of wormhole mechanics - the most detailed descriptions in the world were still not as good as experiencing it first hand. And, of course, it would be awesome to actually be part of the flag team - even if it was just for a day or two. She knew that was the highest dream of a number of her colleagues, and even though she worked closer to the team than most of them she too had secretly wished to go out and do some adventurous field work with SGC's finest.
A/N: Wohoo! I both uploaded a chapter AND wrote several sentences today. And what wondrous, and perhaps slightly romantic, adventures await? Who knows. The references belong to Rodd and Todd, and the episode where counterfeit jeans are sold out of the garage, respectively.