The fact was that, wherever — and whenever — they were, their priority was still getting back to Earth. And Hecate’s hat’ak remained their best shot at finding an operational Stargate. So, for now, he was willing to play along and see how far this game took them.
Dix turned and pulled a lantern from its hook on the wall. “Follow me,” he said, his gaze fixed on Teal’c. “Then you will understand.”
As Dix walked from the room, Zuri on his heels, Jack glanced across at Carter.
The unease on her face mirrored his. “What if he’s telling the truth, sir?”
“We’ll burn that bridge if we get to it, Major. For now, let’s just find a way home.” Pushing all other considerations from his mind, he focused on Dix’s lantern as it lit the way through the ruined tunnels. “Stay sharp,” he said as they headed out after him. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
The rubble had thinned out here, and the way was clearer and easier to navigate, but Jack didn’t like how the lantern light bounced off the walls; the shadows stirred something queasy in his gut, a sense that this planet was wrong to its very core. Here and there on the ground, he saw a swathe of the same red paint they’d followed here.
Dix led them onward, until they reached a wide hole in the ground. From somewhere far below, a sound echoed like metal on stone. “Sounds like a dig,” murmured Daniel, but he too seemed anxious as he peered into the darkness of that pit.
“What’s down there?” said Jack, fighting the urge to draw back from the edge.
“You asked me to help you return home.” He gestured to the hole, and Jack saw that a rope hung over its edge. “Now you must trust me.”
They’d come this far and in the end it was nothing, a swift rappel down a long, sheer drop, then an awkward crawl through a narrow gap hewn into a wall.
They emerged into a large cavern, where men and women worked with hand tools, chipping away at the rocks and excavating them in hefty woven baskets. At first, Jack couldn’t understand exactly what it was he was looking at. High above them was a panel with shattered windows, the remnants of some burnt out technology barely visible in the darkness beyond.
“Oh my God,” whispered Carter, her voice stricken in a way that Jack didn’t want to acknowledge. It was a desperate whisper, an awful sound.
“No, Carter…” But the back of his throat was acrid and bitter; he’d seen what was slowly emerging from the tumbled rocks of the cavern.
“The time, sir, the daylight hours. If I’d been able to keep count, I would have known. I would… I would have realized.”
“What is this —?” said Daniel, but his words broke halfway.
Stone by stone, one hammer blow at a time, a curve of gray was being exhumed from its resting place. Familiar symbols gleamed in the torchlight, one of them a two sided pyramid topped by a circle, frozen in time. Frozen for a century, just like the Stargate on which it was engraved.
“You wish to return home, Colonel O’Neill?” said Dix. “You see now why I cannot send you there.”
And in a moment of shock, of shifting reality, Jack’s eyes suddenly made sense of the fractured world around him. They couldn’t go home, because this was home. This was Stargate Command.
This was Earth.