Death Game

Chapter Eleven

The lights of Pelagia were winking out, fires damped as people sought their beds, lamps extinguished. John and Teyla sat beside the broad window, looking out toward the sea. The hanging lamps in the room behind were unlit, giving them a better view without the backlight. Tolas had not returned.

Nor had Jitrine. Teyla had changed John’s bandage herself. The cut looked long and nasty, the stitches dark with dried blood, but there was no redness of infection. Teyla had liberally smeared on her last packet of antibiotic cream and rewrapped it with the field dressing from her pocket before the sun set and she lost the light.

A short while before, the guards had opened the door to admit two servants with a tray of food, which they left on the table by the window. Her attempts to find out what was happening from them were fruitless. It was doubtful they even knew who Tolas was, much less whether he had spoken with the king.

Now they sat on either side of the table, poking at the remains of the food in a desultory fashion. There had been two wings of some sort of fowl roasted in a sweet sauce, a pottage of stewed grains and greens, bread, honey, and more of the ubiquitous fruit — a good meal, but not a spectacular one. Teyla thought this emphasized their uncertain status further. It was not what one would feed a prisoner, but given the level of wealth they’d already seen in the city, it was not fare for an honored guest either.

On the other hand, John did not seem to be fretting at the delay for once, and she said so.

He looked up from the bones he was picking at and shrugged. “Delay works for us. Lorne and Rodney will show up any minute. It’s just as well if they turn up before we talk to the king. If he wants to wait until in the morning, that’s probably in our favor.”

“That is true,” Teyla said, taking a long drink of cool water. “We do not know the reason why, if they know this world, the Wraith have left this city alone. But since they apparently have for centuries, it is unlikely that will change tonight.”

John blinked. “You don’t sense Wraith, do you?”

Teyla shook her head. “I do not. There are no Wraith close by, not within perhaps twenty or thirty miles. I am not certain what the range of my Gift is, but when there was a Wraith in Atlantis before the siege I had a very clear sense of him when he was entirely on the other side of the city. I would certainly know if there were Wraith within the palace or within Pelagia.”

“That’s good to know,” John said. “Really good to know.”

“I am certain,” she said. “There are no Wraith close at hand.”

John’s eyes strayed again to the window, a slight crease between his brows. “I hope Ronon and Zelenka are ok. They should be, on the island. There was plenty of water and food. But with that Wraith cruiser around…”

“I know,” Teyla said. “I am worried about them too.”

“We are screwed,” Radek said.

“Pretty much.” Ronon’s voice came out of the darkness from somewhere at the other end of the boat, which was to say about a meter away.

They lay on the upturned hull, which rose and fell in choppy seas. Above them the sky was clearing, bright stars appearing in unfamiliar constellations. Radek wondered which were the navigational stars in this world, which were the ones that men who knew anything about boats steered by. Unlike them, who knew nothing about boats. Perhaps this had been a little rash and foolish of him.

Radek sighed. “My father said I should come to a bad end if I did not stop being so impulsive.”

Ronon snorted, something that might actually have been intended as a laugh. “What did you do that was impulsive?”

He sounded like he thought it was impossible, which rankled a little. “Perhaps going off to another galaxy full of creatures that eat men with no plan and no way to get home?”

There was a long silence. “Ok,” Ronon said at last. “I’ll give you that.”

“Yes, you should,” Radek said.

I heard about the Stargate years before I passed through it. It is super secret, super secure, but that does not mean there are not whispers. There always are. No matter how secret something is, there are whispers, unsubstantiated rumors, little hints here and there. I am good at putting together little hints. But I did not believe the reality of it. I thought it was a theoretical possibility, even maybe a project of the American military. I did not know there was a real, working Ancient device.

Ironically, I found that it was true not in any normal way, but through something that had no bearing at all. I had finished my doctorate at Cambridge in ‘97, but I did not immediately have a brilliant job waiting for me. I applied for many things, but none of the things came through by the end of the summer, and I must have work. I was offered a two month job in Paris, working for an old professor of mine who was engaged by the Louvre to take stock of some of the many things they had put away relating to the history of science. It was two months, and it was basically a glorified clerical job, but it was a paycheck and it was Paris, so I said why not?

The Louvre may be the world’s greatest museum but its basements are crap. It is as though they just hauled everything down there for a century, then jumbled it up in the Second World War, and then let it sit for fifty years. My old professor was working on a touring exhibition about the history of science, so my task was to go through hundreds of documents and woodcuts and engravings and minor pieces and documents donated to the Louvre and pull out things that seemed to apply. There were unsigned sketches of Montgolfier balloon ascensions and engravings of fanciful ice age animals based on the bones of wooly rhinos found along the Danube. There were Hamiltonian observations of Mount Vesuvius and Leonardo’s flying machines. It was intriguing. It was interesting. I did not feel I was wasting my time at all, unearthing all the starts false and true that we have made.

And then I found it.

The sketch was by Vivant Denon, who had been the official artist of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition. It was titled in his flowing hand—“A rendering of the Strange Device discovered in the Temples of Philae.” It looked like a control panel, a round pedestal of some kind of metal with broad keys on it, each key inscribed with an unfamiliar symbol. In Denon’s time, of course, hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered, so he had no way of knowing these symbols were nothing Egyptian. But I knew it.

A later cataloguer, but not very late from the coppered ink, had added “An Altar of Some Type?”

But it was not an altar. Denon had been right. It was a device. He did not have the concept of a keyboard, but I did. This was a keyboard in an unfamiliar system with unfamiliar symbols, like nothing I had ever seen before. It was a round keyboard, symbol keys and a blank in the middle. These were pushbuttons. It did something.

I dropped everything. I went seeking Denon’s papers, his letters, his work. If he sketched it, he might have written about it as well. What I found was both brief and tantalizing.

“…a device that was perhaps an object of study in the Renowned Museum, though it is far older in origin than the Ptolemaic materials it was discovered with. I am perplexed as to the metallurgy involved, as diamond cannot scratch the surface, and even hot iron does not seem to mar it…”

I am out of my field, I thought. This is not my study. But I was bored. I did not know people in Paris. I considered it an intellectual challenge. I tried to find more. Only there was little to find. A few tantalizing tidbits. Perhaps the device itself had once been stored in the Louvre, but if so it had been removed in 1941 with so many other treasures, removed to Berlin by the Nazis. If it had ever been here, a cautionary if. After the war no one knew anything of it. Perhaps it had been taken to the museum in Berlin. If so, like Schliemann’s Trojan gold, it had been in turn a prize for Stalin.

Or perhaps it had never been in Paris at all. Perhaps it had been too heavy for Denon to recover with the limited resources of the expedition at the time, and had remained in Upper Egypt. Perhaps it was there still, on the island of Philae, or drowned beneath the spreading waters of Lake Nasser.

And then I was offered a job, a good one. I took it, I left Paris. But the mystery did not go away. Perhaps it was that my new job was boring, teaching first year students things older professors did not want to bother with. Perhaps it was that I had no research project of my own, but as winter turned into spring again I found myself looking at the photocopies I had made of the Denon sketch. Was I the only one who had found this odd? Was I the only one who had looked at this sketch in a century? Was I the only one who found this puzzle intriguing?

I found at last a précis of a paper that mentioned Denon and the mysterious device, a wild paper given at a historical conference in 1990 about aliens building the pyramids and ancient spacecraft in Egypt. It mentioned the line in Denon’s diaries, but not the sketch. Had the author not known of the sketch? It might have made a tenuous line of reasoning more palatable. But perhaps he did not know, this Dr. Daniel Jackson.

It was difficult to find anything about him, but at last I got an address for his current employer, somewhere in the western United States. I wrote to him asking him if he knew of the sketch, if he had considered the possibility that the device had been taken first to Berlin and then Moscow? I am a Doctor of Engineering, I said. I am not a historian like yourself. But I have found this interesting, and I wondered…

A month later and I had forgotten. Then my telephone rang. It is Dr. Daniel Jackson, he said. I am in Paris by chance and I wondered if you might come by train and meet me. I would like to look at the Denon sketch with you, would like to meet you.

And I thought, why ever not? It is a spring weekend in Paris, and it is not so far on the train. If this Dr. Jackson is a nut, I will have dinner with him and then shove off. And if not, perhaps we will share this mystery. It will be enjoyable.

You can guess what it was, can you not, my friend?

Dr. Jackson bent over the sketch and let out a long, fervent breath. “It’s the missing DHD from the Giza gate,” he whispered. “They must have taken it away to make it harder for anyone to ever use it again, and it became a Ptolemaic donation at Philae. But the Ptolemaic scholars didn’t know what to do with it, and they never found the Stargate.” He caressed the old paper as though it were a lover’s face. “The Germans must have found it in Upper Egypt in 1906.”

“I think you had best explain what you just said to me,” I said quietly.

Dr. Jackson looked at me, and his eyes were bright. “Dr. Zelenka, can you keep a secret?”

Most of the Marines had gone to sleep. Cadman and two men were keeping watch, patrolling in long circles around the grounded jumper, the beams of their flashlights sweeping the night. Lorne was sleeping. He’d been up all night the night before.

Of course, so had Rodney, but you didn’t see him sleeping. Oh no. Rodney was running a final diagnostic on the jumper’s main power. It would be a very bad thing if his repairs blew out as soon as they put any strain on them. And they were likely to put a strain on them. The way things usually went, there would certainly be a strain.

Rodney checked his watch. Five hours to fix it, about two am local time. Did Rodney ever sleep? Never. Rodney was up all one night and up all the next, because no one else could possibly do what Rodney did.

He went to the back of the jumper and looked out at the cool desert night, leaning on the doorframe tiredly. Right. Just a minute, and then he’d wake up Lorne and tell him they were ready to go.

“Are you ok?” Cadman asked softly, her P90 slung against her.

“Yes,” Rodney said.

“You look really tired,” Cadman said.

“Yes, of course I look really tired! I’ve been up for nearly 48 hours!” he snapped.

“I know,” she said. “You’re really persistent. I have to say that I respect that a lot, the way you stand by your friends.” Cadman shrugged. “Like they stood by you when you and me… When we had that problem.”

Rodney looked at her, wondering for a moment if she was making fun of him, but her eyes were entirely honest. “Thanks,” he said. It wasn’t like he got many compliments. Not from military and not from women. He expected her to be making fun of him, but she didn’t look like it at all.

Cadman glanced at him sideways. “I guess we kind of got off to a bad start, huh?”

“You could call that a bad start,” Rodney said. “But it might be the understatement of the year.”

“I was actually trying to help you with Katie Brown,” she said. “I mean, I know you really like her and it’s not that you’re a jerk. It’s just that you’re shy and you expect rejection.”

Rodney blinked. “Did I ask you for psychoanalysis?” he managed.

“I bet you were the kind of guy who could never get a date in high school and college, which is a shame. You’ve got a lot going for you, under the surface.” Cadman gave him an encouraging smile while Rodney stood there speechless. “Thinking about it now, maybe you thought I was trying to embarrass you or pick on you, and I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t. I think you and Katie would make a great couple. And if you’d ever like any advice or anything, I’d be happy to.”

“You’re crazy,” Rodney sputtered.

“Maybe it would help if I told Katie what happened and apologized?” Cadman said. “It’s the least I can do. I’m really sorry if I screwed it up for you, Rodney.”

“What, because she thinks I’m a mental case?” Rodney demanded. “Yes, that might screw it up just a little!”

“That was totally my fault,” Cadman said. “I tell you what. When we get back, I’ll go find Katie and explain. That way she’ll know you’re not schizophrenic or something.”

She was probably making fun of him. She’d say she was going to do that, but it would turn out to be a big joke, and he’d think she was being nice but really she and Katie would be laughing at him behind his back. That’s what always happened. You think a woman likes you, but she’s really telling her friends what a fool you are, passing notes in the back of class and rolling her eyes.

But Cadman looked serious. If she was playing that game, she was really good at it.

“Sure,” Rodney said shortly. “Whatever. When we get back. If we get back. I think I’ve got the jumper working again, but if we run into the cruiser we’re screwed anyhow. It’s got a lot more firepower than we do. But at least we can die in the air.”

Cadman gave him a little smile. “Then I guess we’re ready, huh?”

“Yes,” Rodney said. “We’re ready.”

“Maybe you could take a little nap in the back of the jumper while we’re on the way,” she suggested.

“It’s not that long a flight,” Rodney said, but he had to admit it sounded appealing. While Cadman went outside to tell Lorne the repairs were finished, he sat down in the chair behind the pilot’s seat. Maybe he could just close his eyes for a minute while Lorne herded cats.

He was asleep in thirty seconds.