Chapter Six

The breakfast is good and Agnes tucks in as Daniel watches her eat. The café is almost deserted save for someone asleep at the back in a booth. 'You must have a lot of unanswered questions about Stargate Command, about everything that you've seen so far.' He asks as he adjusts his glasses.

'Questions? I wouldn't know where to start, this is all so far out of my comfort zone. ' Agnes thinks for a moment, pausing with her fork mid-air, 'Actually, I do have one. How are you involved in all of this? I thought I was contacting an ancient language professor at an American university, not a member of some secret military government space agency?'

Daniel smiles. 'It's a long story.'

'I have a feeling Professor Cromwell is not going to let me leave any time soon so, I'm all ears.'

Rob Bowden wakes with a start from a dream. He had been asleep longer than he thought and the café is beginning to fill up. One or two people are at the counter and a couple are eating breakfast, deep in discussion near the front. He reaches for his coffee only to find it is gone cold and so he drops a few coins on the table as a tip and leaves the café. Time to start. The thought is clear in his head but he is just not sure what it is he needs to start.

Teal'c and Jack survey the ruined side of Dragon Hill in the dawn mist. The reading on the hand-held scanner Jack is holding is unmistakeable, as he suspected, the coins and the box Rob Bowden was holding must hold the same Nadquadh-like material. He calls softly to Teal'c. 'There's a clear signal, with any luck we should be able to track him with this. It leads off down the hill on the same path he ran away on.'

Teal'c and Jack make quick work of following the trail, first to the barn and then onto a series of byways and footpaths, leading in a direction vaguely familiar to them both.

'Are we heading back to the truck stop?' asks Jack.

'Indeed, it would seem so, perhaps food after a night in the barn was his first priority.' Teal'c quickens his step. 'If we are quick, we might catch him there!' he calls over his shoulder to Jack as he breaks into a jog.

Daniel and Agnes both jump as the doors to the coffee shop burst open and Teal'c and Daniel come charging in, both running flat out.

'Where is he?' Jack spins around with the monitor, locating a booth at the back of the shop and indicates to Teal'c to move around to the other side as they close in on the table. But they are too late, the booth is empty save for an empty coffee cup and few coins scattered on the table.

'Dammit! He's gone. Did you two not even see him here?' He asks, trying not to get angry.

Agnes' mind is whirling with the story Daniel has just told her about Ra, slaves, distant planets and Stargates and the thought the same thing could be happening here, to her, is almost too much. 'See who?' she asks irritably. 'You keep acting like everyone here knows what's going on but you explain nothing!'

'Rob Bowden, that's who... having breakfast right behind your back by the looks of it.'

Agnes starts guiltily at the recollection of a young man asleep at the back when they arrived. 'Well, it never occurred to either of us it was Rob Bowden. He had his cap pulled down over his face!'

'Do not worry, Agnes, he can not have gone far. Come Jack, we can still catch him. If we run.' Teal'c starts for the door again.

'Great, more running, just what I need.' Jack mutters under his breath. 'Next time you two, try paying more attention... hold on Teal'c, not fair, you got a head start!'

Later, Daniel and Agnes stare at the twelve coins laid out in their individual cases on a table in the SGCUK laboratory assigned to them.

'If we assume they are co-ordinates to get to Thuban, or more likely, MG3alpha, do we even need to translate them, can't we simply dial them into one of your Stargates and go there?' Agnes carefully opens a box and places the coin into the palm of her hand.

Well, firstly none of our gates have any of these symbols on and secondly we've only ever needed seven or nine glyphs to fix a destination.' Daniel explains patiently, ' Six for the or eight for points in space, the seventh or ninth for a destination gate or a distance beyond a galaxy. I have never seen theses symbols anywhere, in any galaxy I've visited, or, on any gate anywhere and yet they all have this White Horse symbol on them on the back, the same one that was metres high on your earthquake hill.'

'Dragon Hill..' Agnes absent-mindedly corrects him. '..hey, wasn't the ring that Rob Bowden wearing a dragon?'

'Yes! Good point.' Daniel calls up the photo Jack took on one of the nearby monitors.

'Yes! Does it match any of the glyphs?'

'No... look at the way he's looking at it though, like it's his precious!'

'His what?'

'Nothing... just a Tolkien reference, not a fan of fantasy books then Daniel, after all you've been through?' Agnes teases him.

Daniel chuckles quietly and replies, 'I think my reality far outstrips any novel. More than enough fantasy for one lifetime.'

'And yet here you are, looking for adventure again.'

'I didn't go looking, you emailed the pictures of the coins to me, remember!' Daniel replies slightly indignantly.

'I'm teasing you!' Agnes laughs out loud, a cheerfully infectious laugh and for no good reason he can understand, Daniel finds himself smiling at her broadly. 'On a more serious note, I'd say the style of the dragon carving isn't the same as the coins.'

'You're right,' Agnes returns to work. 'It is a different style. If we assume it was in with the hoard, it could be the same age but from a separate culture or tribe. A trade item maybe?'

'So, possibly two different cultures and two different language sets, assuming, as with other Stargate glyphs these have a word associated with them...'

'..or just a pretty dragon ring with no language value whatsoever.' Agnes concludes.

'Well, I'd say it's a dead end for now without any more items to compare it with.' Daniel remembers something Agnes had said yesterday. 'You said something yesterday, about new research up at Stonehenge, I meant to ask what it is, it could be relevant.'

'Stonehenge?' Agnes thinks for a moment then remembers, yesterday seems like a lifetime ago with all that has happened since. 'That reminds me, I need to find out what happened to my car as well... yes, the new discoveries. More features in the landscape... Hold on, I'll pull up the video on the internet... no coins were found though.'

'I think Professor Cromwell is onto something with the thought of Stonehenge being a replica of off-world technology, something once seen by an indigenous population on these isles and perhaps kept alive in their collective memory through stories or songs, or carvings on hillsides. The site could well overlay the real gate or temple that the gate was housed in, the labyrinth symbol on the front of the coins is found all across Europe, it points to what could have been a large Empire stretching from here to the edge of Asia, one to rival and pre-date Ra in ancient Egypt.'

Daniel watches intently until an area called 'Blick Mead' is described, in use centuries before Stonehenge was built. Agnes almost gasps, it fits exactly what Daniel had just described.

'It's only a short distance from where we are.' She says, an idea forming in her mind. Without thinking she slips the coin she is holding into a pocket and grabs her jacket, searching for her car keys at the same time. 'Come on, let's find my car, Jack said it was being brought back here, then we can head over there and see what we can find.'

Daniel and Agnes park her car in a lay-by and head on foot through the scrubby woodland to where the archaeological dig had taken place at Blick Mead. The ground starts to rise towards the old hill fort nestling in a bend in the river Avon. Here and there springs well up after the heavy winter rains, feeding into small streams, slowly working their way to the river nearby.

After exploring the area for an hour or so and finding little evidence of anything they are about to leave when they stumble across a large, circular spring pool hidden in dense woodland further upstream. To Daniel it immediately looks too symmetrical to me a natural formation and so he starts to search its bank for any evidence of being made. After ten minutes or so of searching he stubs the toe of his boot on a rock protruding from the ground and hops around cursing for a second or two as Agnes clears back the undergrowth to reveal a piece of carved rock jutting out of the ground. They work together to pry it loose from its hole and eventually pull out a piece of broken masonry, part carved with a woman flanked by two horses.

'Epona!' Daniel sighs. A relic from Roman Britain, no doubt. Agnes nods in agreement, a depiction of the horse Goddess Epona, one of many Gods and Goddesses worshipped throughout Europe in Roman times.

'Beautiful carving. I wonder what it's doing here?'

'Perhaps the pool was used for rituals to her.' Daniel sits down after the exertion of excavating the stone and, finding a small, flat pebble nearby, tosses it into the water, watching as a set of concentric rings spread out over the surface. Agnes searches in her pocket for a tissue to wipe the mud from her hands when she finds the coin and she pulls it out and stares at the labyrinth on the front as the ripples spread out in front of her. 'Daniel, what if this isn't a labyrinth at all, what if it's a symbol for ripples on water instead.' She holds the coin out to him and he stares at the symbol and then back at the pond. She continues, 'You said the gate creates a sort a stable wormhole like a whirlpool of water, what if this isn't a symbol of a maze at all but a pictogram of the vortex itself?'