STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust by Peter J. Evans Page B

them, the world seemed ferociously clear, its edges sharp and crystalline. She had forgotten how much detail the goggles had to trade in order to turn night to day. “Sir, we found this.”
    O’Neill frowned past her, at the pit and its forlorn collection of tools. “Daniel?”
    “Right with you.” Daniel was ridding himself of his own goggles, unlocking them carefully to avoid snagging his spectacles. “Oh, I see… Ah, Jack? Can you give me some light down there? No, at the hole, that’s it.”
    In the beam of O’Neill’s flash, the dark rectangle Carter had seen earlier suddenly flipped its perspective. Through the goggles, she hadn’t been exactly sure what it was, but now she could see that it was a smooth-sided hole in the sand, lined with what looked like black stone.
    “Is that the TIAMAT anomaly?” she asked.
    “I think so.” Daniel took a deep breath. “I guess this is where we start unloading the truck.”
     
    The shaft didn’t go down as far as Carter feared it might. After a few meters it terminated in a sheet of dull, golden metal.
    Daniel was kneeling next to her, at the edge of the hole. He had been running his hands over the smooth stone of its interior for the past minute or two, as if trying to gain some insight into its origins by touch alone.
    “It’s granite,” he said finally. “Incredible workmanship, but it’s human.”
    “How old?”
    He shook his head. “Can’t say. It doesn’t look old at all, but appearances can be deceiving.”
    “They sure can…” Carter stood up. “What about that base plate? That doesn’t look like granite.”
    “No, I’m going to have to get down there. We’re going to need a ladder.”
    “Funny you should say that,” said O’Neill, walking quickly up to join them. He was carrying a heavy cylinder of olive-colored fabric in one hand, which he set down next to the shaft. “Got one right here. But check this out.”
    They followed him to a pile of debris, near the edge of the pit. There was a ladder bolted to one of the wooden boards that lined the excavation, and Carter initially thought O’Neill was showing it to them, possibly as a quick way of getting down into the shaft. But he was pointing his flashlight at the jumble of discarded items at the ladder’s foot, probably dumped there by people scrambling to get up and out of the pit.
    Daniel reached down and hauled something free of the pile. “I’ll be damned.”
    It was another ladder, and much like the first; solidly built from square-section wood, reinforced at one end with angled iron plates. But the other end was very different — the wood there had been splintered apart, the bottom rung compressed laterally until its centre was a forest of shards.
    The ladder looked as though it had been snipped messily in half.
    Daniel passed Carter his flashlight, and then took the ladder in both hands and carried it over to the shaft. She followed him, making sure his way was lit, and then watched him lower it, damaged end first, into the hole.
    The angled plates at the top edge dug solidly into the sand. “Look at this. It just hits the baseplate.”
    Carter aimed one of the torches down. Sure enough, the broken end of the ladder was resting a fraction above the golden metal. And there was something else, something’s she’d not noticed before. “Splinters,” she told him, pointing. “There, in the middle. See?”
    A few pale shards of wood littered the centre of the baseplate. One or two stood vertical, as though trapped there.
    “I think that plate is at least two separate pieces. They must have come together and snipped the ladder in half.”
    “‘The sacred seals are in place’,” Teal’c quoted. He had appeared from nowhere, and was looming at the shaft’s edge, aiming his own flashlight into the depths. “It would appear that this entrance is deeper than we had first assumed.”
    “Depends how long the ladder was originally, I guess…” Carter leaned further over the