The deer were gone, and nothing had emerged to replace them. No predators. No people.
Not even a freakin' bunny rabbit.
Jack scanned the treeline again with a sigh. After fourteen hours of guard duty this mission, it was burned into his brain – the tree with leaves a little darker than the others just to the left of the yellow bush that was being overtaken by some sort of vine that climbed the next three trees... Geez, he needed this mission to be over. "Anybody finding anything interesting?"
"Uh... This world was once ruled by a Goa'uld named Atok," Daniel called back. "I don't know; maybe it still is."
"Atok is dead," Teal'c offered.
"Never mind."
"Pillar about a dead guy," Jack mused. "Nope, not interesting. Carter, whatcha got?"
"Looks like ocean jasper, sir," she called from her little corner of the ruins.
He raised an eyebrow. But he was bored, so he headed her way. "I don't see any oceans."
"This area may have been covered in water once, like much of our planet. But geologists think this stone comes from magma high in silica."
It still didn't sound interesting... until he looked at the stone beneath her hands. It had been cracked, sheared in half, and the inside was a sunny yellow covered in tiny spheres of bright pinks, blues, and greens. "Wow."
"Yeah." She shot him a grin. "We have it at home, too, but only a few veins in one tiny part of Madagascar."
"Madagascar. Is there anything you don't know, Captain?"
With a shrug, she offered, "We can only see the color because lot of these rocks are broken, and I don't know why. A large-scale bombing would have leveled the pillars, too. Seismic activity, maybe, but I would expect cleaner lines and less field damage that way."
"So, from above, but not large," he mused. "Shelling, rather than one large bomb. Meteor shower, maybe?"
She raised an eyebrow. "That's a theory. I haven't found anything that would imply a large impact, but there are certainly some glassy rocks around here that must have been formed by heat. And a field of small impacts could create a set of... kind of micro-earthquakes, I suppose, that would have broken these."
Jack scanned the sky. "Are we gonna die in our sleep tonight?"
Her laugh was warm, smooth. "No, sir, I doubt that."
"Excellent news. You feeling better?"
"Yes, sir, thank you. I just needed something to do."
"Good. Carry on." He headed back to his post.
