Totality
by Rheanna

Summary: At totality, anything can happen.
Rating: PG
Timeline: Season 1
Completed: 1999/06
Length: 64,200 words
Notes: Gen.

Prologue

The night was close and hot. Those were the only constant features of the forest's climate. In the year there were seasons of rain and seasons of mist, seasons of growth and seasons of decay, but the jungle's heat and humidity were ever present. The air was heavy and moist. It sank through the tree canopy and settled over the forest floor like a sodden blanket.

Dicenos lay on his back at the edge of the empty circle of earth at the heart of the rainforest. Around him, he could hear the faint swishing of the lightest of breezes as it rustled the tree tops' slim branches. From time to time, those soothing whispers were interrupted by the piercing hoot of a nocturnal creature on the hunt.

He had come here to dream and, having dreamt, sleep now eluded him. So he lay still, luxuriating in the warmth the ground had captured from the sun's rays during the day.

The Circle was his people's holy place, but the clearing would have held a fascination for Dicenos even if it had not been. This empty space was the only place outside the village where the ever-present forest canopy broke open, allowing an unrestricted view of the sky above. Dicenos stretched on the dusty earth, studying the shapes in the heavens above him.

The constellations offered him the reassurance of the familiar. He recalled learning from his father how to find and name them. That had been a long time ago, and his father was many seasons gone.

Dicenos blinked and gazed up at the stars. There was the Great Oak, three bright stars forming the trunk, topped by a plethora of smaller, fainter lights which marked its branches. Its smaller twin, the Sapling, was by its side, as always. The River, the bright trail of stars which mimicking the meandering bends of the water-course on whose banks Dicenos' village sat, was particularly clear tonight. It flowed with celestial dignity through the gap between the large and small moons. And in the most distant corner of the sky, the Snake was visible, a hissing, malignant presence outlined against the blackness beyond.

See the Snake, touch the Stones.

That was the rhyme the village children sang to one another; it had not altered since Dicenos had been a boy. He was far too old for such childish games, and yet...

He reached out a hand in the darkness, and found the base of the nearest Stone. The rock was cool and smooth beneath his fingertips, reassuringly protective. There were nineteen Stones in all, outlining the circle at the edge of which Dicenos lay. The Stones were the tribe's protectors, their sentinels. The means by which they had escaped danger once, and perhaps the means by which they would escape it again.

That was why he could not go back to sleep. He had come here to ask for answers from the Stones and in their generosity they had responded through his dreams. Dicenos withdrew his hand and shivered, in spite of the heat.

Cerian had objected strongly when he had informed the council of his intended expedition. He was no longer, she had reminded him, a young warrior, and could not hope to out-run or fend off any of the many local carnivores he might encounter. But he had insisted and eventually, because he was the tribe's leader, she and the other members of the council had relented. He knew, however, that the village would enjoy little rest this night until he returned safely to them.

It was a risk, Cerian had said, and he was too old and too valued to take such risks. She would want to know when he returned if the risk had been worth it, if the Stones had spoken.

He must consider what he would tell her.

He would tell her that yes, they had spoken: that was the truth. But the question then became, how much to share. How much to reveal.

The Stones had spoken. They had showed him images. Some he understood, some he did not. He had seen another stone circle, standing in a summer's field of gently rippling grasses. He had seen the sun blacken and hide its face in the middle of the day. He had seen strangers arrive, out of the forest.

All of this, he decided, he would tell.

But then there were the dreams he would not tell. The ones in which the village burnt. The ones in which the child-which-was-not descended from above the tree-canopy, with the lust for death glittering in its beady bird's eyes. And then the final dream, from which he had woken with the conviction that the council would soon need another leader.

No, it would not be wise to share those details with Cerian. Or anyone else, for that matter.

He blinked and sat up. He would not sleep again tonight, and he had learnt all that he needed to know. He would not disturb the Stones further.

Dicenos got to his feet, massaging the feeling back into his sore, old limbs. As he left the Circle, he looked upwards one final time. The two moons, one nearly full, one a thin crescent, looked back down at him. He nodded, acknowledging the sky's benevolent gaze.

Then he slipped through the dense green wall surrounding the Circle, and back into the forest.

Part I
The Stone Dancers

One

Credenhill, near Hereford, in England Monday August 9, 1999

Outside the window of the Brigadier's office, the evening was rainy and still, the sun's light hazy and indistinct as the yellow star sank out of view behind the English countryside's gentle, rolling hills. An empty cup, rimmed at the bottom with the faintest residue of the long since drunk tea it had contained, sat on the desk, next to a plate spread with biscuits, untouched on top of the paper doily on which the Brigadier's secretary had presented them, along with the brigadier's apologies. Chocolate digestives, custard creams, jaffa cakes.

The cupboard set into the wall opposite the desk had been opened, revealing the small television inside. The sound was low, but the voices distinct in the otherwise quiet air.

"...the Prime Minister will make a live broadcast to the nation this evening to appeal for the mass influx of people into Cornwall to cease. It is estimated that in the past seven days more than two and a half million eclipse watchers have flooded into the region, placing an intolerable strain on basic and emergency services. The Prime Minister is expected to announce that from midnight tonight, all routes into Cornwall will be blockaded. However, it is unlikely that the most determined visitors will be dissuaded from missing a celestial show which will not be repeated in the United Kingdom until the end of the next century.

"Other news: in Northern Ireland, the peace process today looked more fragile than ever as..."

"Aha." The door opened and the Brigadier strode into the study, removing his hat and jacket and hanging them with a swift, neat movement over an empty peg on the wooden stand by the bookshelf. "Major Caliburn. I apologise for my tardiness. The traffic on the road up from London was appalling. It feels as if the entire south of the country has ground to a standstill." He glanced at the open cupboard, the television within. "I'm glad to see you've had the initiative to make yourself at home. I hope you haven't been waiting long."

Rhys Caliburn lifted the television remote and pressed the off button, reducing the face of the pretty newsreader to a tiny white dot in the centre of the screen. He pushed the cupboard doors together, hiding the television behind two flush panels of evenly grained walnut. Credenhill had been an RAF station before the Special Air Services had adopted it as headquarters and the oldest parts of the property retained the atmosphere of a well-maintained country retreat.

"I was held up on the drive here myself, sir," he said. Caliburn's Welsh lilt had softened in the years since he had left his home, but it had not vanished. The accent travelled with him, a mark of his origins which he carried wherever he went. It served to remind him that no matter how far he travelled, there was still a place where he belonged. Although he had not been back there for a long time, and sometimes he wondered if he still did. "It's quite all right."

The Brigadier nodded in acknowledgement and sat, indicating that Rhys should take the chair opposite. He waited for the younger man to settle, fingering the manila folder which he had brought with him from London. "Major Caliburn..." he began, and paused, steepling his fingers together in front of his face.

Rhys waited patiently.

"This eclipse is going to be quite something," the Brigadier remarked.

Caliburn's left eyebrow twitched. Whatever else he had expected, casual chit-chat had not been high on the list of possibilities.

"Yes, sir," he agreed. "Although I'm no astronomer myself."

The Brigadier smiled wryly. "I think you'll find that not many of those two million odd people down in Cornwall at the minute are either, Major. Occasions like this... have a certain intrinsic sense of import. It draws the crowds."

"Yes, sir."

The Brigadier paused again, then appeared to rouse himself, opening the file in front of him and flipping through it quickly. "Your patrol- Sheldrick, Hart, Doyle- have they enjoyed their leave?"

"The men always enjoy some downtime but... they're ready to get back into action, sir," said Rhys carefully. Added to himself, and so am I.

"Good. That's good." Another pause, longer this time. The Brigadier appeared to be in the throes of some internal debate. Rhys frowned. What was this about? "Major, I have been placed in a position with which I am not altogether happy."

Caliburn waited. He had reported to the Brigadier on a face to face basis for more than eight years, and had heard much about the man before that. In all that time, Rhys had never known him to criticise orders from further up in the army's hierarchy in front of men under his command, had never even heard rumours of it from others. He sensed that he was witnessing something which was, in its own small way, as momentous as the approaching eclipse. He wondered what had been discussed at that meeting which had delayed his CO.

"The Ministry," continued the Brigadier shortly, "in spite of much good advice to the contrary, has decided to proceed with a series of... tests. They are to take place in Cornwall. During the totality of the eclipse."

Unsure how else to react, Rhys nodded.

"Apparently, the research team has been preparing for Wednesday's eclipse for quite some time. However it has only become apparent in recent weeks that the level of public interest is even higher than anticipated." He spread his hands: "I am told that Cornwall's water and sewage system is capable of bearing the needs of two million people. There are half as many again there right now. You are probably aware that the Third Division has already been deployed to help the regional police and emergency services."

"I had heard something to that effect."

"Then you will appreciate that this is not the ideal time to carry out classified testing. Yet the decision has been taken to proceed. And I have been asked to lend a patrol to the project for the duration. Your patrol."

"May I speak freely, sir?"

"Of course."

Rhys spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. "While I appreciate the need for a military presence, I don't see the necessity of involving the SAS when the Third is already on the ground. Cornwall isn't enemy territory."

"Perhaps I should clarify the situation. The Ministry has not only requested your presence during the tests: they also want your participation."

Participation. There was something about the tone in which the Brigadier ended the sentence which made Rhys feel distinctly uneasy. "May I enquire as to the nature of the tests, sir?"

"You may enquire," said the Brigadier stiffly, and Caliburn realised that he had stumbled on the heart of the matter: "But I may not respond. The full briefing is to be held when you arrive on site. After you've met the Americans."

"The Americans?"

"A team from NORAD. They are coming to observe the tests." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "In fact, they should be en route by now. They're due to land at RAF Lyneham in the early hours of tomorrow morning. You will rendezvous with them there and accompany them to the site. Jane will make sure you have an itinerary before you leave."

Something told Rhys that the 'you' being addressed was singular. "And my men?"

"Separate arrangements have been made for them." The Brigadier spoke sharply, then caught himself. "My apologies, Major Caliburn. I have... reservations about this situation. I do not like men under my command being placed entirely at the disposal of civilian authorities. I do not like this... external interference, even from the Americans. Especially from the Americans. I do not like issuing orders in an information vacuum."

"Then may I suggest that you don't issue them?" Rhys sat back in the chair, forced himself to appear to relax. "Brigadier, I would like to volunteer myself and my patrol for the assignment under discussion."

The Brigadier hesitated, then nodded. "So noted." Abruptly, he stood up, pushing down on the edge of the wide oak desk as he did so. "You would be well advised to brief your patrol this evening, Major. Your schedule as of tomorrow morning is tight."

"Very well, sir."

"Dismissed."

Caliburn turned to go, then stopped at the sound of the voice behind him: "Tell them..."

He looked back.

"Tell them the mission involves reconnaissance."

Rhys nodded. "Yes, sir."

Reconnaissance? In Cornwall? In the middle of an eclipse?

What the hell did I just sign us up for?

Two

"Black in the corner pocket. Off both cushions."

Andy Sheldrick screwed green chalk into the tip of his cue, pretending not to look in Hart's direction as he did so. In the corner of the games room, a television set blared out edited highlights of Newcastle versus Chelsea in the Premier League. The soccer match was reaching its decisive moments and Andy, whose lifelong commitment to Queen and country was rivalled only by a similar lifelong passion for Newcastle United Football Club, tried not to let it spoil his concentration.

Sergeant Derek Hart shook his head smugly. "Not possible, mate. Angles are all wrong."

Sheldrick made a derisory noise at the back of his throat. "Lad, I was playing pool in the pubs of Tyne and Wear when you were yelling to have your nappy changed. Stand back and watch a master at work."

Stepping back from the pool table, he leaned over, tensing his left hand so that the cue rested in the bony hollow between his knuckles. The age difference between himself and the two youngest members of the patrol was not nearly as extreme as the many running jokes concerning it. True, Sheldrick was older than the rest of his patrol- and looked it too, he thought ruefully- but he wasn't ready to collect his pension yet. In the meantime, Andy had no aversion to making the case for maturity and experience on a regular basis.

On the telly, Burt passed to Ferguson, who moved neatly in past Chelsea's defensive formation. Determinedly, Sheldrick focused on the table. Played the predictions game. Newcastle will equalise, and I am going to pot this bloody black and wipe that smug grin off his face.

He pulled the cue back, eased it forward, pulled back again. Nice and easy. Ferguson had passed to Shearer, who was nearing the goal mouth. Andy relaxed his shoulder muscles, kept the hands rigid, pictured the white ball sliding forward, bouncing off the green baize, hitting the black... He breathed out.

Thunk.

The white ball exploded from the tip of the cue, ricocheting off the cushion towards the black. On the screen, Shearer made a strike for the goal. The match commentator was breathless and gushing. Sergeant Hart was standing back, holding a can of lager, one eyebrow raised.

The white ball hit the black, which rolled in the exact direction of the pocket... then slowed, and stopped precisely on its lip, teetering without falling. At the same time, Shearer's kick sent the football squarely into the goalkeeper's arms. Seventy nine minutes played, and Newcastle were still one-nil down.

"Not your night," observed Hart with a grin, stepping forward and administering the simple tap required to knock the black into its final resting place and take the game.

"Shut up," Andy told him, but without rancour. "That's still three-two to me."

"Now there's a coincidence," noted Corporal Doyle from his position on the elderly, shapeless sofa at the far side of the room: "It was three-two to Chelsea as well."

Hart grinned and lifted his can to Doyle in a mock salute. Sheldrick threw his cue down on to the table in disgust. "Oh, thank you. Thank you very bloody much, Doyle. Do I creep round in the middle of the night and fill out your crosswords for you? No. So is it too much to ask that I might possibly, once every so often, get to see the highlights without you spoiling it completely?"

Doyle did not raise his head from his book, but a faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he bent his long legs so that his feet no longer jutted out over the far end of the couch. Andy wondered if the Corporal ever got fed up with living a world designed for short people. No bed or bath was ever quite big enough to accommodate his lanky frame, and Sheldrick was by now accustomed to waking in the morning to find him fast asleep on the floor next to whatever insufficiently long bed he had been assigned.

At twenty eight, the Corporal was the youngest member of the patrol, and although he had over ten years' experience, he still had the appearance of a gangly adolescent. He spent a lot of time off duty in the weights room trying, Andy supposed, to acquire a more impressive physique. It wasn't necessary: Doyle could walk eight miles wearing a full pack in less time than most of his colleagues took to run the distance. Sheldrick had been astonished by, and grateful for, his endurance on more than one occasion.

Doyle turned the page and settled back into his book. From where he was standing, Sheldrick could just make out the bright colours of what looked like a map inserted into the text.

"Whatcha reading, Doyle?"

Doyle folded the book shut, marking his place in it with a thumb, and held it up so that the front cover was clearly visible. It was, Andy saw, yet another of Doyle's seemingly endless supply of books on travel. This one was called Italian Journeys. Andy grinned indulgently. "Planning your next leave?"

"I'm not due any until October."

"You could get there sooner if you could persuade someone in the government to declare war on Italy," suggested Hart.

Doyle's head vanished as he sank lower into the sofa's cushions, returning to his book. Sheldrick grinned at Hart and dug another twenty pence piece out of his pocket and stuck it into the slot at the side of the pool table, watching as the red and yellow balls rolled down the chute which was visible through the glass panel in the table's side. "Rematch," he challenged.

"Evening, gentlemen."

Andy looked up, saw the Major standing in the Rec Room doorway, and responded automatically, stiffening into a pose which, despite the generous amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, was a fair approximation of attention. On the other side of the table, Sergeant Hart was doing much the same thing, while the squeaking of ancient springs from the battered sofa behind him testified to Corporal Doyle's reaction.

"God, you lot would make my old drill Sergeant weep." The humour in Caliburn's Welsh lilt was unmistakable. "But at this time of the evening, I should be grateful you're all capable of achieving the vertical. At ease. Good night, I take it?"

Sheldrick grinned. "Yes, sir. We were sorry you couldn't join us."

"So was I, but there was a reason. I've just seen the Brigadier. We're back on active, as of tomorrow morning."

"About bloody time," growled Hart.

"Don't get too excited, Sergeant. You haven't heard where we're going yet."

Hart rolled his eyes. "Oh God. Not the desert again." With ginger hair and skin as pale as the white of a fried egg, Hart baked in the sun. He had been hospitalised with sunstroke in the Gulf, and had never lived it down. His face flushed red within hours of exposure, then burnt, and the rash of freckles scattered liberally across his nose and cheeks glowed lividly for months after the initial damage healed, making him look like a naughty schoolboy. The slight chubbiness which persisted around his face did nothing to dispel the impression. "Babyface" was among the gentler nicknames Hart had earned during his time in the patrol; to his credit he bore the constant stream of good-natured abuse with stoicism.

Caliburn almost smiled. "Nothing like it. We're going exploring... in Cornwall."

Andy blinked. "Sir?"

"A civilian science team wants to borrow a patrol for a week, and we're the lucky guinea pigs."

"Guinea pigs for what, sir?" asked Doyle from the sofa.

Caliburn's expression flickered, the easy manner returning within the briefest of moments, but Sheldrick caught the interlude and exchanged a look with Hart. "The details haven't come through yet. We'll be briefed when we get there." He paused. "You should also be aware... the Yanks are sending over a military team to observe. The Brig wants us to liaise with them. So it's best behaviour and no farting at meals, Sergeant."

Hart feigned innocence. "Me, sir? Surely not, sir?"

The Major smiled, then nodded briskly. "You're going straight to the site in Cornwall to meet the scientists. I'll meet you there after I collect the Yanks from Lyneham. Be ready to move out at 0600 tomorrow. Goodnight, gentlemen."

Hart waited until he had gone before relaxing his posture, slumping against the edge of the pool table. He looked at Sheldrick and Doyle. "You know what this is?" he said: "Bloody babysitting scientists and Americans."

Doyle was wearing a puzzled expression. "There's going to be an eclipse," he remarked softly, almost to himself. "How do you observe anything in the dark?"

Three

Tuesday August 10

On any other day, Rhys would have allowed no more than two hours for the drive from Credenhill to RAF Lyneham, but the previous evening's news, with its reports of gridlock as far north as Bath, convinced him to set off even earlier than he had planned. He was awake and in the shower at twelve minutes past five, rubbing the shampoo in his palms into a generous lather on his scalp. He rinsed himself off and padded back into the bedroom of his quarters, dripping as he went. The room was tidy, even spartan. Rhys had been based at Credenhill for nearly six months, but somehow he never seemed to find the time to personalise his surroundings. It didn't seem worth the effort. These quarters were not home.

Once dry, he retrieved a clean uniform from the wardrobe and dressed: underwear, trousers, then finally the shirt, which he buttoned up over the small cross-shaped mark which stood out like a brand on his lower abdomen. More than one person had taken it to be the scar of an old wound incurred in conflict, but the truth was more mundane: the birthmark ran in the Caliburn family with the same persistence as the waves of dark hair Rhys had inherited from his mother's side. His paternal grandmother had claimed the mark was proof that the family carried Druid blood. Rhys had his doubts about that, but it made for interesting pillow-talk.

He was driving through Hereford as the first grey light of dawn began to suffuse the eastern horizon, listening to Today on Radio Four for company. At the 6.30 timecheck, he glanced at his watch. Sheldrick, Hart and Doyle should be taking off about now; the Americans should be landing.

Although there were undoubtedly more vehicles travelling south than would have been normal, it was sufficiently early in the morning that he experienced no delays on the way to Lyneham. He arrived shortly before eight o'clock, and by a quarter past eight he was standing outside the open door of the barracks canteen, having been directed there by the duty Sergeant when he had enquired after the Americans. "What do they look like?" Caliburn had asked.

The Sergeant had grinned. "I don't think you'll have any trouble picking them out, sir."

He had been right about that. The mess hall was empty, the base's permanent residents having been and gone before the visitors had arrived. But even if the hall had been packed, Rhys doubted he would have had difficulty locating his charges. They were attacking the breakfast which had been provided with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and a conversation was in full flow. Odd vowel sounds rang out across the canteen, jarring with the gentle burr of the kitchen staff in the background. No one had yet noticed his presence, and Rhys hung back for a moment, curious.

"Frome. Shepton Mallet. Thruxton Grately." The speaker, a lean man somewhere in his forties, was holding down a map with one hand while spearing food on to the tines of his fork with the other. The haircut and the bearing said military, although he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and slung his uniform jacket over the back of his chair with something less than military precision. "Are these places or diseases?" Rhys squinted at the jacket and recognised the wings of a USAF Colonel on the sleeve.

"How can you face that at this time of the morning?"

The younger man across the table, dressed in unmarked fatigues, was spreading margarine thinly on a slice of brown toast and eyeing the contents of the plate opposite him with unease.

"How can you survive until lunch on that?" The Colonel gestured with the fork. "It was this or cereal. The choice was pretty limited. No bagels, no pancakes, no hash browns... although the sausage kinda makes up for it. This is damn good sausage. Teal'c, try some."

"Don't do it, Teal'c. You'll get cholesterol poisoning and Junior will die."

They were both addressing the third man at the table. Rhys had been studying him curiously for some time already. A black man with a powerful physique, he might have stepped straight out of a US Marines recruitment campaign. But, like his younger companion, his uniform was unmarked. Bizarrely, he was wearing a black, close-fitting hat pulled down so low on his forehead that it almost hid his eyebrows.

Teal'c was regarding the lump on the end of the proffered fork with deep suspicion. "What is this, O'Neill?"

At this, the fourth member of the party, an attractive blonde woman, looked up from her grapefruit with a smile which suggested this kind of bizarre interchange was not uncommon. She was wearing her jacket, the double bars of a Captain in plain view. "Word to the wise, Teal'c: if you're going to eat that, you probably don't want to know what's in it. Or how it's made."

This appeared to sway the odd Mr Teal'c. "Thank you, O'Neill, but my..." he paused, as if the word was unfamiliar: "...cereal is sufficient."

Rhys shook his head in disbelief. Who were these people? Californians?

O'Neill pointed the fork, and the lump of sausage meat, at the Captain in what seemed to be mock irritation. "Oh, thank you, Carter. Spoil my continuing efforts at cultural acclimatisation, why don't you."

The response which the Captain opened her mouth to make was drowned out by a sudden explosion of violent sneezing from the young man. Dropping his toast, he turned his head away from the table and buried his mouth and nose in a wad of paper tissues. "Sorry," he said when the fit had passed: "Travel allergy." He rolled the used tissues into a bundle and began to cast about for a fresh supply.

The Captain produced a small packet of travel handkerchiefs from somewhere on her person and handed it to the young man, while the Colonel shook his head sceptically. "How can you be allergic to travel? Pollen, dogs- those are things people are allergic to. But travelling?"

"I'm not allergic to travel per se. Travelling aggravates all my other allergies-" Abruptly, he started sneezing once more.

"Danny, you spend your whole life travelling."

The sneezing was almost under control again. "All the more reason not to have to make long-haul plane trips at ten minutes' notice," he complained. "And I still haven't heard a good explanation why we're here."

"We are here, Daniel, to enjoy an all expenses paid vacation on good ol' Uncle Sam."

Carter looked at O'Neill wryly. "Strange, that wasn't what I heard the General say at the briefing. As I recall, what he said was, liaise with the British and..."

"...And ascertain whether the monument could conceivably function as a Gate," completed the Colonel, "the answer to which depends on three simple questions. Is it made of Naquada? No. Does it glow blue and wobble in the middle? No. Is it inscribed with those neat hieroglyphs Danny here gets so excited about? No. Is it therefore a Stargate? No. The prosecution rests its case, and SG-1 gets a few days of leisure and a ringside seat for the best celestial show since Hale-Bopp."

Rhys stepped forward, covering the distance to the Americans' table in a few strides. "The general opinion is that the eclipse will be a good deal more impressive than the comet," he said mildly, and gave a smart salute. "Major Rhys Caliburn. Welcome to England, sir."

Instantly, O'Neill was on his feet, returning the salute, Captain Carter only slightly slower off the mark. Mr Teal'c stood and inclined his head in what was clearly a gesture of respect, and Daniel wiped his fingers on a bundle of clean tissues before offering a hand to be shaken. Rhys passed on that.

"A pleasure to be here, Major. I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill." O'Neill indicated the other observers in turn: "This Captain Doctor Samantha Carter, Doctor Daniel Jackson, Mr Teal'c."

No rank for Jackson, noted Rhys, which did not surprise him: the haircut alone (well, lack of it) was enough to convince him that the young man was not military. As for Mr Teal'c, who looked and acted like a soldier but who had neither a TITLE nor, apparently, a Christian name... that one he couldn't figure just yet.

Rhys looked to the table, where a forlorn lump of sausage lay spiked on the end of a fork, and a limp slice of toast sagged off the side of Dr Jackson's plate. "Please don't allow me to interrupt your breakfast. I'm going to make sure the helicopter is being made ready to take us down to Penzance. We'll be on our way within the hour."

"Cool," said O'Neill. Rhys looked at him. Cool was not a word he expected the nearly middle-aged to use with such an obvious lack of self-consciousness.

"I expect so," he agreed, and began to make his way back to the canteen door, noting in the periphery of his vision as he did so that while Carter, Jackson and Mr Teal'c had resumed their places at the table, O'Neill was walking behind him.

Caliburn stopped, turned around abruptly. "And if it is a Stargate?" he asked. Not sure why he said it. Not sure what reaction he would get.

The Colonel looked at him, his face suddenly cautious and closed. "Isn't that your decision, Major? We're just here to... observe."

Rhys nodded, and left. As he exited the canteen, he was dimly aware that O'Neill was standing in the doorway, watching him go, and he wondered which of them had given away more in that last exchange.

* * *

"Can you believe the Air Force signs off on his pay cheques?" Jack gestured with amused theatricality in the direction of Daniel as the archaeologist retched into a long, thin paper bag. "How embarrassing is that?"

The helicopter bounced and rocked in what the pilot had called "some small degree of turbulence". Either that had been conclusive evidence of the famous British predilection for understatement, or the guy had just been plain wrong. Jack was currently trying to decide which.

Carter patted Daniel sympathetically on the shoulder with one hand, while relieving him of the sick-bag with the other. "This is worse than the plane," he said, shutting his eyes and tipping his head back against the green painted metal of the Chinook's interior wall. "Are we nearly there yet?" He sounded, thought Jack, like a kid in the back seat of the car on a long vacation drive.

O'Neill checked his watch. "Another thirty minutes should do it."

"Oh God."

Taking pity on him, Jack unstrapped himself, got up and walked- or, more accurately, hopped and swayed- across the pitching floor to sit beside the archaeologist. "Try looking out the window. It'll help."

"No it won't."

"Carter, tell him."

"Motion sickness can be alleviated by focusing on something steady in the distance. The ground will work as well as anything, Daniel. And it's quite a sight."

One eye opened, warily. Then Daniel manoeuvred himself around under the webbing which held him in position, craning his neck to look out of the one of the helicopter's small porthole-type windows.

Below them, Cornwall sped past, the rolling green countryside punctuated by rivers and the occasional small lake, glinting in the morning sun. O'Neill, who had seen parts of pretty much everywhere on the face of the planet from the air, was nevertheless struck by how organised the patchwork of fields was, how compact the land, how tidy. His first training flights had been made in the wide open skies above the Midwest's endless, sprawling prairies, where towns were tenuously linked by thin, meandering roads like pearls on a fine gold chain. Here, the towns and villages were squashed together, tessellated up against each other in order to make the best use of the severely limited space available. And the names on the map- St Austell, Truro, Redruth, Camborne: they were old names, spoken and refined by the tongues of a hundred generations. This was an old land, with a heritage which spanned not hundreds of years but thousands.

No wonder the damn Brits had such a superiority complex.

"It's like Woodstock three down there," said Daniel, temporarily distracted from his nausea.

"Yeah," agreed O'Neill, "except with more mud and longer lines for the john."

Carter unhooked her belt and lurched across the aisle to join them; after a moment Teal'c followed her.

"The radio said two and half million people," she remarked, gazing at the fields filled with brightly coloured tents. The roads between them were jammed with cars and caravans like coloured candies arranged by a meticulous child. The overall effect was as if someone had lifted the whole island by the Scottish end, and allowed the bulk of the population to slide southwards. "God, it must be standing room only."

There was a click and a hiss from the front of the cabin and the hatch to the Chinook's cockpit swung open. Caliburn's face, almost completely obscured by helmet, headset and goggles, appeared around its edge. "Landing in ten. Time to strap in, please." He was speaking loudly and distinctly in order to make himself heard over the roar of wind at his back.

O'Neill nodded to show he had understood, thinking that the Major sounded like one of the better varieties of British nanny, polite but implacable. He crossed the aisle to return to his seat, watched Daniel struggle through the one hundred and eighty degree turn away from the window, twisting his straps. Carter reached over to free him, catching O'Neill's gaze as she did so. Her eyes flicked to the now-closed hatch where the Welsh Major had been standing. "Sir?"

Jack shook his head. "Tell you later." Hoped he wouldn't have to. Hoped he had misread the other man. Doubted it.

The big, twin-bladed Chinook began its descent towards Penzance.

* * *

Whupwhupwhup

Whup-whup-whuppa-whup-ahh

Lieutenant Andy Sheldrick watched the heavy blades mounted on the Chinook's front rotor beat the air with a steadily slowing rhythm, and the force five hurricane pushing him backwards so hard that he was leaning into it at an acute angle just to stay on his feet eased to nothing more than a steady gale. By the time the front doors opened and Caliburn hopped down onto the grass, the wind tousling Sheldrick's hair was little more than a light breeze.

A few seconds later, the aft hatch slid backwards and the Americans appeared. Sheldrick glanced sideways at Sergeant Hart. "Bloody hell," whispered the Sergeant out of the corner of his mouth, "Talk about your mixed bag."

The Major approached, and Sheldrick fired off a rapid salute, which was accepted with a polite nod of acknowledgement. The Americans gathered behind him; one of them, a shaggy-haired man about Hart's age, was wobbling slightly on his feet and had a greenish tinge to his complexion. "Smooth flight?" enquired Andy.

Caliburn shot him a look which clearly said, play nicely.

"A little bumpy in places," said the Major. He turned to the man now standing at his side: "Colonel O'Neill, this is my patrol- Lieutenant Andrew Sheldrick, Sergeant Derek Hart, Corporal Craig Doyle."

"It's a pleasure," said the Colonel easily, and introduced his people. Within moments, Andy found himself shaking hands with each of the observers in turn. Jackson's grip was clammy, that of Captain Carter cool and firm, and when he got to the unusually named Mr Teal'c...

Sheldrick stood, one hand hovering in empty air, feeling foolish. He looked up at the right moment to catch the Colonel waggling his eyebrows meaningfully first at the man at his side, then Andy's hand. Sheldrick shook hands with Teal'c, and winced.

O'Neill clapped his hands together and rubbed them against each other in a gesture of exaggerated anticipation. "So what's the plan?"

Andy pointed in the direction of a sloping path of trampled grass which led up the field in which the helicopter had landed, towards the next meadow. At the crest of the hill, a low white canvas dome was visible as it flapped in the light breeze. "We were asked to escort you to the site as soon as you arrived, sirs."

"Lead on," said O'Neill, and they threaded their way in single file through the long summer grasses.

Four

The first thing O'Neill said once inside the tent was: "God. It's Stonehenge for munchkins."

There were nineteen stones in all, and none was taller than himself. They were arranged in what appeared to be a fairly accurate circle, although there was a gap at the eastern side of the ring. Whether this was an intentional feature, an entrance of some sort, or whether a stone had been removed at some point in the distant past was impossible to tell.

Jack had never really understood the appeal of ancient monuments, even before his life had twisted in a direction which frequently involved being chased or shot at while running around some particularly fine examples of them. Stars and planets which kept perfect geometry under the inexorable influence of unseen forces impressed him; rocks which sat in imperfect geometry, and only then because someone had spent a hell of a lot more time than was psychologically healthy putting them there, did not. He could just about see how, on a misty morning, or in the warm glow of the evening sun, these nineteen flawed and weathered obelisks could adopt a certain mien of mystery. However, under the roof of the canvas marquee above them, and with tarpaulin sheets spread around and between them, the stones simply looked mundane. They were just rocks, he thought, not worthy of all this hoopla.

And for half a century people had thought the Stargate was just a stone circle, too.

Now where had that unwelcome thought sprung from?

"What's all the equipment for?" asked Hart, staring at the variety of instruments and computers which were clipped on, taped to, sitting on top of, and, in one instance, jutting out of the stones. "It's just a load of rocks."

"Quiet!" The injunction was hissed with conviction: "They'll hear you and be offended."

O'Neill turned to see an impossibly tall man with impossibly wild white hair bounding towards them across the plastic sheeting. The Geiger counter in Jack's head, sensitive to eccentrics, began to click loudly. The guy was wearing a bow tie, for crying out loud.

"Who will?" asked Daniel.

Well done, Danny. Encourage him.

"The Maidens." The man gestured expansively around the stones. "Or possibly the Men. I haven't managed to ascertain the gender for certain yet."

"So," said Jack slowly, "there are... boy rocks and girl rocks?"

The man tut-tutted disdainfully. "No, not in general. But these stones... they are known locally as the Merry Maidens. Or sometimes as the Dawn's Men. Hence the confusion. However, the latter name is a corruption of the Cornish phrase Dans Maen, meaning, Stone Dancers. So, as maidens may be dancers, but men may not be maidens, I suppose I've answered the question. Professor Irvine Yarrow."

He blinked, smiled, and Jack had the sudden impression that he had known where his ramblings were heading all along. O'Neill took the offered hand, performed yet another round of introductions, then waited while Caliburn went through the same rigmarole. The Major was looking round himself with curiosity and, so far as Jack could tell, a complete lack of understanding. O'Neill watched him closely, suspicions hardening into certainties.

"Perhaps you could begin by outlining the exact nature of your work to date," said Carter.

Go, girl.

Yarrow positively beamed. "Most certainly. I'd be delighted to give you a complete history. It has been- "

"Professor, our American guests have been travelling through the night. I'm sure they would benefit from being shown to their accommodation before we drown them in technical detail."

The individual who had appeared at the Professor's elbow was an edgy, bird-like man whose skinny frame was disguised by a well-cut suit. Far too well cut for his current environment, which was, after all, one layer of plastic away from being a field. O'Neill cast a quick glance down at his shoes and was somehow unsurprised to see that, despite the mud everywhere else, they were black and shiny. It figured. Spooks. He knew the type: nothing stuck to them.

"You're quite right, Mr Pinker. I do apologise, Colonel, Major. We can resume this discussion later."

Jack nodded. That suited him just fine. All he really wanted to do right now was get his people somewhere they could talk in private, before someone came out with something unwise, like-

"Do you really think this could be a Stargate?"

O'Neill winced, shot a look at Daniel which he hoped conveyed extreme displeasure, and was rewarded with the kind of expression children give their parents when they genuinely don't know that forcing buttered toast into the CD player is a bad thing. But when Jack looked away again, he found that Major Caliburn was staring at himself, not Daniel.

Okay. Time to make a strategic withdrawal.

"If it's okay with you, the first thing we'd like to do is take a tour of the site. Make sure it's secure."

"I can assure you it has been made quite secure." Mr Pinker had a voice like cream liqueur: sweet, persuasive and sickly after the first mouthful.

O'Neill smiled at him amiably. "We're here to observe. Well, we'd like to start by observing the perimeter."

"We'll accompany you, Colonel," said Caliburn.

"Not necessary." Something in the Major's expression closed down, and Jack realised regretfully that he'd probably just screwed any chance he had had of hitting it off with the man. But, dammit, he needed some privacy. He turned to go, motioning to the rest of his team to follow. "We'll find our own way."

* * *

"Pinker's a spook and Caliburn doesn't know what the hell he's supposed to be doing here."

They were walking along the edge of the field which adjoined the meadow in which the Maidens stood. The wide white canvas tent which hid the stones from view was just visible on the crest of the gentle hill behind them. From this distance the guide ropes which held it up were invisible, making the marquee look like the flying saucer in an old sci-fi movie. The Day the Earth Stood Still, maybe, thought Jack. Klaatu barada nikto.

In the other direction, the meadow fell away into a steep, grassy gully, along the bottom of which had been erected a flimsy-looking wire fence. The fence was insubstantial, but the signs ranged intermittently along its length were large and clear. He could read them easily from where he stood: ECLIPSE SCIENCE STATION. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. The soldiers patrolling the perimeter at regular intervals were probably doing a pretty good job of driving the point home to the mass of eclipse-seekers whose tents, caravans and other assorted temporary accommodations packed the side of the hill opposite. If O'Neill had had a pair of binoculars with him, he would even have been able to make out individual jealous expressions. But no one looked as if they were about to head this way, and Jack would have put money on the fence being electric, too.

But Jack had a reason to be glad about the fence. Because of it, he and his three companions were now walking through what was very probably the only sizeable patch of empty countryside within a hundred miles. With no one else within earshot.

"Spook?"

It was Carter who answered Teal'c, but she was looking at O'Neill as she spoke. "He's a British Secret Services operative, Teal'c. Like Maybourne but sneakier."

Now there was a severe attack on character, if Jack had ever heard one. And the description would probably mean more to Teal'c than a half hour lecture on the structure of British Intelligence. Carter didn't have O'Neill's experience in covert ops, but she had spent more than enough time in the Pentagon's somewhat dingy corridors to make up for it. She must have realised the truth about Pinker nearly as quickly as Jack had.

Daniel's expression indicated that Mr Pinker's profession was a genuine revelation to at least one member of the party. "Do you think the Professor knows?"

Jack shrugged. "Doesn't matter. Either he doesn't, and Pinker is running things behind his back, or he does, and he's willingly handed over the reigns of his pet project in return for the funding to green-light it. No, what worries me is that the Major is so obviously in the dark and that Mr Pinker so obviously wants to keep him that way."

"Fine. So we'll tell him."

O'Neill turned around and paced backwards, spreading his arms wide. "Y'see, I'm thinking that that's the point here, Danny."

Daniel looked to Carter for assistance. "Is he making sense?"

She nodded. "I'm afraid so."

"It's like this, Daniel." Jack jabbed a finger back in the direction of the UFO-tent-thing: "That's no more a Gate than the washer-dryer in my garage is. We knew that before we got on the plane. More than that, I'll bet Mr Pinker knows that too, even if our over-enthusiastic friend the Professor doesn't yet. The purpose of this little charade is to put one well-informed military unit in close proximity to a similar but less well informed unit, and hope that khaki-coloured bonding takes place and we spill the beans to them about what we really do under Cheyenne Mountain when the folks upstairs at NORAD have gone home for the night. This- " he waved an arm expansively, taking in the tent, the hill, the sky with its imminent eclipse too (hell why not, maybe God was in on it, He'd sounded English in The Ten Commandments): "This is nothing more than an elaborate charade, an exercise in information gathering by the Brits."

Daniel opened his mouth to say something, but Teal'c beat him to it. "I do not understand. Is this nation not an ally?"

"Well... yes," said Carter, uncomfortably.

Jack spread one hand flat and waggled it. "Kinda. At least, we've fought on the same side in the last couple of notable wars. Although if the Spice Girls release any more albums, we may have to take action for the good of civilisation and bomb them into submission."

Teal'c looked puzzled, and Jack found himself regretting that crack: the last thing he needed on top of everything else was to field questions about British girl groups. Come to think of it, he wondered what Teal'c was making of this whole expedition. He nearly hadn't made it this far- the original orders O'Neill had received the previous morning had referred only to himself, Carter and Daniel, and a swift call to the General had confirmed that Command was less than enthusiastic about the idea of allowing the only genuine example of alien life readily available out of the country for any extended period. Jack had other ideas, chief among which was that, however grey or fuzzy the Jaffa's official status was, the one thing he most definitely was not was a prisoner inside Cheyenne Mountain. So, O'Neill had yelled about SG-1 being a four-person unit and generally pitched a hissy fit until he had persuaded Hammond to make use of his long-standing and frequently extremely useful friendship with the current incumbent of the Oval Office. One of these days Jack fully intended to ask him where they knew each other from.

"But the Gate is something special, right?" Daniel spoke quietly; Jack could tell realisation was beginning to dawn. "Finders keepers, and we found it. And other things equal, we'd prefer if no one else even knew about it."

"Something like that."

Carter frowned. "But they do. Even if they don't know details, someone knew enough about the Stargate to request our presence here in the first place. Which begs the further question- why did our government admit the existence of the project by agreeing and sending us?"

Now that was a good question, O'Neill was forced to admit, and not one to which he was currently able to suggest a reasonable-sounding answer.

"I have no idea. But if I'm right, all we have to do is be real careful what we say until eleven minutes past eleven tomorrow morning. When the Prof's experiment fails to ignite, we can all go home."

"What happens at eleven eleven?" asked Daniel.

"What all that equipment back there is set up to record and monitor," said Jack. He raised a hand and pointed up at the sun. The rain which had greeted them as they had landed at RAF Lyneham had dissipated, and it was a fine English summer's afternoon. The sun shone brightly on the fields, brilliant and warm. There was no indication in the heavens of the inevitable approaching conjunction with the moon. But it would happen.

"Totality."

* * *

Sheldrick leaned back in the bright sunshine and wished he'd had the foresight to bring his sunglasses with him from Credenhill. Another couple of days like this and there would be hosepipe bans and the inevitable items on the Nine O'Clock News about reservoirs drying up. It was good to know there were some things in life you could rely on.

"It beats Croatia in December," he said. "And bloody Ulster any time."

"I like Cornwall," agreed Corporal Doyle. "It's peaceful." Which if you didn't know Doyle, ruminated Sheldrick, you would have thought a very strange thing for a professional soldier to say. But that was Doyle.

Sergeant Hart eyed the gentle rolling greenery of the surrounding hills and vales, and screwed up his expression into a mixture of distaste and mistrust. "Not enough buildings," he pronounced. "Not enough roads."

"How old were you before you'd been outside London, Hart?"

"Old enough to know that green is what happens when something's gone off."

"Bloody Southerners."

Hart ripped a handful of damp, mossy grass from the earth and hurled the sod with vengeful enthusiasm. Andy caught it easily- although it half-fell apart as he did so, soil and mud oozing between his fingers- and threw it back. The brown, slimy mass hit Hart square in the chest even as he tried to dodge the impact, and it splattered, leaving a large, dark splotch on the front of his shirt and a mass of tiny flecks on his face and neck. He made desultory attempts to wipe the worst of it off. "Oh, hell. Where am I going to get a clean uniform from?"

Doyle had neatly avoided the fracas by returning his attention to the task at hand. Several large crates had been delivered to the site soon after themselves, and he had started unpacking them. He peered into the first box, frowning at its contents. "I don't think that's going to be a problem." He lifted out a package and threw it to the Sergeant. Even through the reflective plastic wrapping, Andy could read the neat embroidery above the breast pocket: SGT D HART. He nodded appreciatively.

"They thought of everything. For once."

"Yeah," said Doyle, oddly. "Everything." He lifted out more clothes, packs of rations, other mundane field essentials, the paused and hefted an oblong metal case into the sunlight. Resting it on one knee, he flipped open the catches and exhibited the contents to the others.

Sheldrick stared at the disassembled MP-5, and the ammo beside it. "Is that-?"

Doyle nodded. "Live. There're at least another six in here."

Sheldrick looked at the pile of crates in front of them, did the maths. "Bloody hell. They can send us into deepest hostile territory woefully under-equipped, but twenty four hours in Cornwall merits the full monty. Fucking army admin."

Hart was confused. "I don't get it. What could we possibly need all this for? D'you think Cornwall's planning to declare independence or something?"

"God, I hope not," said Andy. "For their sake."

Five

"I'm terribly pleased to have the opportunity to talk with you, Dr Jackson. Psycho-sexual Symbolism in Rameside Period Hieroglyphs is a definitive article. I recommend it to all my students."

Oh God. Daniel smiled politely, and tried not to grimace. Why was the psycho-sexual symbolism paper the only one anyone ever remembered? If only it hadn't made quite so much sense when he had written it on a caffeine and junk food high six hours before the submission deadline. Out of the corner of his eye, he could just make out the smirk on Sam's face.

Yarrow beamed happily at Daniel, oblivious to the trauma he was inducing. He guided them around the patches where grass trampled to mud was leaking through the plastic underfoot as they wove a path between the Maidens. The afternoon sun was warming the canvas over their heads, and the air inside the tent was sultry and still.

"Although it was of course your later work which first sparked my interest in this project."

Daniel looked at him, surprised. "A lot of the later papers weren't, umm, particularly well received by the academic community." Yes, that was one way of putting it. They'd done everything except throw rotten fruit at him when he spoke at conferences.

Yarrow smiled indulgently. "A prophet in his own country, eh, Dr Jackson? Yes, it was your re-translation of the inscriptions at Giza, and the connections drawn to astronomy which intrigued me. I found the notion of the pyramids at Giza being aligned exactly as the stars in Orion's belt absolutely fascinating..."

Daniel found himself nodding enthusiastically. So someone had made it beyond his somewhat unwise foray into ancient Egyptian sexual mores. "There are two other pyramids in the area which fit into the representation of Orion, and another where Sirius should be."

"At the time, I was working on British archaelogy, so Egyptology was merely a pastime. But then I participated in a project at Stonehenge, and I saw..." Yarrow paused, and spread his hands wide for effect: "I was studying a map of the area, and I saw the same pattern, the shape of Orion, being formed in the barrows around the rivers Avon and Kennet. And when one considers that the barrows, when originally constructed, would have been highlighted in gleaming white chalk..."

"...then it's obvious they were built as starmaps," finished Daniel. "And the stone circle at the centre was the observatory."

"Precisely. So we have two sets of ancient peoples on different sides of the world independently developing a fairly sophisticated understanding of astronomy and expressing it in exactly the same way, within a very narrow band of history."

"Except that it wasn't necessarily independent," began Daniel without thinking. "They could have- "

"-Fortuitously arrived at similar conclusions given the same set of external stimuli as Egyptian society," interrupted Sam, and looked pointedly at Daniel.

The Professor, absorbed in his own train of thought, apparently missed the sharpness in her tone. "Well, yes. That was what I concluded initially as well. And then I found something here..." He turned and began to stride away from them, long legs loping easily over the stagnant water pooling in the plastic sheeting underfoot from the previous day's rainfall. Daniel started to follow, and felt Sam's restraining hand on his shoulder.

"Sam..." he began.

"No," she said firmly. "And that's not up for discussion."

He gave her a pained look. "I spent my whole career in academia being laughed at, Sam. And they were wrong and I was right. We know for a fact that there was a Goa'uld presence and Goa'uld technology in ancient Egypt. They could have zipped around the planet in a couple of hours. It's perfectly possible that there is a connection."

"And it's equally possible that it is a coincidence. And even if it isn't, we still say nothing."

At the far side of the ring, Yarrow was kneeling by the one of the larger Maidens, brushing gently at its base with a small cloth. Daniel wondered what kind of reception he got at conferences. "In the last twelve months, I've written twenty papers, not one of which I'm ever going to see in print. I don't even get to talk to anyone outside the SGC... Couldn't I just...?"

"No." Sam hesitated, then continued: "Daniel, I know this isn't easy. But what we do is secret, and that's that."

"Right," said Daniel heavily. "All because we have something they don't."

Yarrow was waving at them to join him. Daniel stalked off across the ring's diameter; after a moment, Carter followed.

"Now this," said Yarrow, kneeling and pointing: "this is quite something. As far as I can tell, it's a unique engraving, although the style and symbolism are more suggestive of Egyptian hieroglyphs than anything of ancient British origin. It's as old as the Stones themselves. Do you recognise it at all, Dr Jackson? "

Daniel stared at the pattern etched into the granite for a long time, unwilling to answer the question with the outright lie it demanded. He didn't merely recognise the carving: the upside down V-shape with the half-circle at its crux was as familiar to him as the letters of his own name.

It was the seventh glyph.

* * *

Rhys doubted that any of the unwashed assorted students, tourists and new age travellers gathered on the neighbouring hills posed a particular security threat-especially with the regulars of the Third pacing the electrified fence around the site's perimeter. Nevertheless he stood the first watch, and told Sheldrick to expect to be woken some time after midnight. Caliburn was not comfortable with the idea of all four members of his patrol being simultaneously unconscious, no matter how safe the territory.

Although with Mr Pinker in the vicinity, he wasn't sure that this particular corner of Cornwall was quite as safe as it should have been.

In Caliburn's experience, situations generally became messier once Intelligence got involved. And in this case, it was clear that Mr Pinker was very involved indeed in whatever the hell was going on out here in the Cornish countryside. Rhys paced along the damp grass, trying to slot the different pieces of the puzzle together in some kind of pattern-revealing order. There was Mr Pinker, with his smooth and empty words. There was the Professor and his experiment. There were the Americans. And finally there was Rhys and his patrol, right slap bang in the middle of things and yet completely ignorant of the true state of affairs, whatever that might be.

No, he couldn't see the pattern.

Rhys was beginning to dislike this assignment intensely.

A noise, a slight clearing of the throat, made him turn sharply. Fifteen years of training kicked in and Rhys brought the gun he was carrying up to the firing position, the bright beam from the torch mounted on its end piercing the darkness. "Friend or foe?" he barked.

The voice which replied from within the piercing white beam was dryly laconic. "American. You make the call." O'Neill waved a hand through the air in front of his face, as if trying to bat the light aside. "And turn that damn thing off. You're blinding me."

Caliburn tipped the rifle up, so that the light, and the barrel, were aimed skywards. "Apologies, Colonel. I thought you'd retired for the evening."

"Yeah, well, it's a clear night, and I wanted to, ahhh..." O'Neill trailed off, sounding, Rhys thought, almost abashed. The Colonel was sitting cross-legged on the grass, something flat and reflective spread out in front of him. Caliburn stepped forward, curious, and saw that he had been consulting a map. A map of the night sky.

"Looking for anything in particular?"

"Persean meteors."

Rhys looked at him. "Excuse me?"

"Shooting stars. Originating in the constellation of Perseus, hence Persean. Tonight's the shower maximum, and the sky's clear. Look." He pointed upwards, and Rhys tipped his head back in time to see a streak of light flame across the starfield then die away. "Make a wish, Major."

The meteor had vanished, and the sky was still once more, but Rhys found himself continuing to stare up at it, his gaze being absorbed by the infinite vista of lights. "It is quite entrancing, isn't it?"

The Colonel began to fold up his map. "I never used to notice it. Always thought stars were just things that country singers compared their girlfriends' eyes to. But once you start looking you can't stop." He lifted an arm, index finger outstretched. "Lemme show you something. See that? Those six stars right there? That's Ursa Major, Major." He grinned at his own small joke, and Rhys nodded. The ladle-shaped constellation was about the only one he could find and name.

"The Plough. Yes, I see it."

"Okay, those two stars at the far end are Merak and Dubhe. Follow the line that way-" he dragged his finger across the sky: "Then down, that's Virgo. That little red disk in the middle of Virgo, that's Mars."

"Planet of war."

"Kinda appropriate for professional warriors, doncha think?"

Rhys nodded absently. He looked at O'Neill. "So you're the team astronomer, then?"

Unexpectedly, the Colonel laughed. "No more than Daniel is a quarterback." He chuckled again, and collapsed backwards on to the damp meadow-grass, propping himself up on his elbows. "No. I'm no astronomer. Just an interested amateur."

Rhys put his gun to one side, and looked at him in the murk. "Then what are you, Colonel?"

"I'm a grunt, Major. I get paid for going where I'm told and doing what I'm told. Just like you."

As lies went, Rhys had heard more convincing words from his chocolate-mouthed four year old nephew concerning a missing Easter Egg. The summer night air was still, and he realised suddenly that it was too still. He looked up at the silver moon, embedded in the starfield, the night's blank, unseeing eye.

The world was waiting for something.

"I have no problems with doing as I'm told," he said quietly, "but occasionally it's nice to know why."

"Yeah," said the Colonel. "Been there."

"So, what am I doing here?"

O'Neill looked at him. "You're following orders. Just like I am."

Rhys watched as O'Neill folded the starmap and got up. He waited until the American had gone several paces towards the dormitory tents before calling out his name. The other man turned.

"What happens at totality?"

"The moon covers the sun entirely, and the corona is visible around its edges."

Which was a correct answer, reflected Caliburn, but not to the question he had been asking. He pointed at one of the low, grey shapes nestling at the marquee's edge like a duckling at its mother's wing. "Pinker's sleeping in that tent over there."

O'Neill nodded once, and changed direction, taking the long way back behind the Stones, as Rhys had known he would.

So they were not friends, although they had a common foe.

He wondered if that was sufficient.

Six

Wednesday August 11

Jet lag doesn't hit until the second day.

Daniel sat at the folding metal and plastic table, trying to get his brain around the concept of breakfast while his stomach remained obstinately convinced that it was still the middle of the night. It didn't help that British army rations were just as flavourless and unpalatable as anything the US military had inflicted on him in the course of his association with it. At least this experience was alleviated somewhat by a limited selection of fresh fruit and dairy products from several local farms.

"Daniel, Teal'c, look."

Across the table, Sam was nodding at the far side of the temporary enclosure which served as combined mess and meeting hall for the eclectic mixture of people who had converged on the Maidens. Daniel nudged his glasses so that they flopped down from their precarious perch above his fringe and landed on the bridge of his nose. The world snapped into focus.

He twisted his head and scanned the room, trying to locate the source of Carter's obvious amusement. At the next table over, Sheldrick and Hart were having a loud discussion about the relative merits of two soccer teams, neither of which Daniel had heard of, while Doyle pored over a wrinkled copy of the London Times. Daniel guessed it must be the previous day's, unless one of the perks of being in the SAS was having your choice of newspaper delivered to you in the field each morning. As Daniel watched, Major Caliburn looked up and caught his gaze. Daniel looked away, feeling that he had been caught somehow. At the largest table, Yarrow and his gaggle of attendant scientists chatted animatedly in the jargon of technicalities. Mr Pinker ate at a table by himself. And standing at the buffet...

Daniel grinned. Jack was holding a whole grapefruit at arm's length, peering at it through one open eye while moving the apple he was holding in his other hand back and forth. A few more seconds of intense squinting passed until, apparently satisfied, he discarded the grapefruit and crossed to join them, biting into the apple as he walked.

"Good morning, campers, and isn't it a terrific morning?"

Carter smiled slightly, and sipped her coffee. Teal'c raised an eyebrow, and although that was pretty much his ready-response expression in most circumstances, Daniel could have sworn that in this instance there was a lightness in his normally stony features. Daniel tapped the table with his plastic spoon. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that enthusiasm born of intellectual curiosity and the thrill of scientific discovery I hear?"

Jack had demolished the apple in several bites, and was attacking a sealed rations pack with gusto. "Hey, the sun is shining and the sky is clear from horizon to horizon. Which means we're in for a great show. Forget intellectual whatever. Can't a guy get excited over a really impressive show?"

Daniel nodded, and shot a look over the table at Sam, whose smile had spread so wide across her face that she was having trouble with her drink. Time to play his trump card. "Sure. Right. So that wasn't a copy of Sky and Telescope I saw you sneaking off to read last night?"

"I was hiding the latest edition of Penthouse inside it," said O'Neill defensively. Bullseye.

"Sure you were," agreed Daniel. Across the table, Sam's shoulders were shaking, and if Teal'c's eyebrow rose any further, it would be in serious danger of detaching itself from his face.

Suddenly Carter became serious again. "Daniel, have you told the Colonel what Yarrow showed us?"

O'Neill looked at them. "What?"

The experience of the previous afternoon leapt to the forefront of Daniel's mind, ratcheting his good humour down a couple of notches. "The seventh glyph. The symbol for Earth. It's engraved on one of the Stones."

Jack continued munching. "So?"

"So," said Daniel, "a little weird, don't you think? Given that this is Cornwall and not Egypt."

"Danny, Ra's autobiography could be engraved on these stones and it wouldn't make a whole heap of difference. So the Goa'uld did a little exploring while they were here. Big deal."

Outside the sun shone. But not for much longer.

* * *

"And the official fashion accessory of the day is..." O'Neill produced four sets of tinted goggles from behind his back with a flourish: "...aluminized mylar glasses. Put 'em on now, take 'em off when it's over. And remember- scorched retinas are for life, not just for eclipses."

Daniel made a face at the excruciating pun as he pulled the bulky goggles over his regular glasses and blinked as his eyes adjusted to the newly-tinted world.

In the midst of the scientific activity which had consumed the hours since breakfast, the two military contingents had been more or less forgotten, with the exception of Carter, who had spent most of the morning deep in conversation with two long-haired techno-geeks, over a particular piece of arcane machinery which was refusing to play ball with the rest of the set-up. Several lengthy bouts of coffee-fuelled reprogramming seemed however to have done the trick, and the Captain was currently strapping on her goggles while her two newest fans watched from behind the machinery with expressions which were somewhat goggle-eyed also.

When it had become obvious that the British weather was going to abandon the habits of millennia and behave itself for once, a small team had been dispatched to remove the marquee's low canvas roof, and the Maidens were now once more bathed in bright sunshine. Only the fabric walls of the tent remained in place, affording some measure of privacy from the legions of eclipse watchers crowded on to the nearby hills.

"So when does it start?" asked Daniel.

A shadow passed across the circle of stones. O'Neill looked at his watch: 9.57. "It just did," he said. "First contact."

High in the eastern sky, the sun suddenly took on a lopsided aspect, as the moon began to eat into its photosphere. A tiny black bite appeared at its circumference, rapidly enlarging and gobbling up the surface of fire. Very quickly, the sky began to darken noticeably; overhead, a flock of starlings swirled once around the circle in evident confusion before alighting on the branches of the trees nearby and attempting to roost.

Yarrow's team must have been made up of veterans with a multitude of similar experiences behind them, because they seemed to have no difficulty ignoring the celestial ballet taking place overhead in order to attend to their various tasks. The military representatives, on the other hand, were probably all going to need neck braces by lunchtime.

"Wow," commented Daniel. "It's weird enough when you know exactly what it is and why it's happening. No wonder ancient civilisations attached so much significance to eclipses."

"Look at the ground."

He looked, and saw through a gap in the canvas wall a thousand miniature images of the crescent sun jump and flicker over the grassy earth beneath the nearby trees. "Magic," whispered Daniel, and he had never used the word with such a certainty of its meaning before.

Sam shook her head. "Physics. The tiny gaps between the leaves must be acting as pinhole cameras, focusing the light on to the ground and-"

But Daniel was not paying attention. Physics was as arcane and mysterious a discipline to him as archaeology was to her. In that respect, he supposed he was not so distant from the ancients who had sat here, when the Stones were raw and freshly hewn, watching the last perfect conjunction of day and night passing overhead with the same feelings of awe and wonder now filling him.

He shivered. The temperature was dropping quickly, and the air was still. Shadows sharpened and the countryside around appeared washed in a metallic grey hue. Parallel lines of light and dark skimmed the still grass in the meadow below the Maidens. "What is that?"

"Shadow bands," said O'Neill. "Caused by irregular atmospheric diffraction of the sun's rays."

Daniel looked at him. "Who are you and what have you done with Jack?"

"Oh for crying..." O'Neill rolled his eyes. "You're not the only person who can read books, y'know."

Daniel smiled. Around them, the world was preternaturally silent, waiting.

"Eleven o'clock," came Yarrow's voice, a soft call across the circle. "Totality in ten minutes."

Daniel started, and peered at his own watch in the gloom. Where had the last hour gone? Overhead, he could see the Moon's shadow approaching from the western horizon, the harbinger of night. The sun was the merest sliver of its former fullness, and even that was diminishing rapidly as the dark disk of its silver sister slipped in front of its face.

"Second contact," said O'Neill. "We'll see Bailey's Beads in a second."

"What's- ? Oh..." In the seconds before the moon covered the sun's face entirely, the rim of light at the sun's exposed edge broke up into a chain of discrete blobs of light which shone along the arc, diamonds scattered by God's hand. The sight, in its full breathtaking near-perfection, lasted only for a moment, before the beads began to wink out, one by one. The final bead burnt brightest and longest, creating a diamond ring in the sky, a token exchanged between sun and moon, between heaven and earth.

With a conscious effort, Daniel released the breath he had not realised he was holding. He made himself take slow, deep breaths of the chilly air, and looked down momentarily. And saw...

"Jack."

O'Neill grunted in acknowledgement, his attention focused on the spectacle above.

"Jack, the Stones are glowing."

"It's another optical effect."

Now Carter and Teal'c were looking at their ground-level surroundings again. "No, sir, Daniel's right," said Sam. "It almost looks as if..." she broke off. O'Neill twisted around to look at them wearing an expression which clearly heralded a firm intention to tell them both to shut up and watch the eclipse, and stopped.

The Maidens were glowing, not with a silvery reflected light but with something altogether different. A blue-tinged lambency ignited their granite surfaces in cold fire, flowing in shimmering waves over the Stones like water. Like water. And where had Daniel seen that particular effect before?

Carter beat him to it. "My God. It is a Gate."

"But that's- that's not possible," stuttered Daniel.

"I know it's not a Gate. You know it's not a Gate," said Jack. "Anybody want to tell the rocks?"

There was no doubt about it now. The Stones were coming to life around them, drawing the attention of the grouped watchers increasingly from the sky above. Caliburn and his men looked around themselves in increasing confusion. As Daniel watched, the Major took a step forward into the ring, some instinct drawing him closer to his men in the face of the unknown.

It was completely the wrong thing to do.

"Get out of the circle!" yelled Daniel. A fraction of a second later he registered that Jack was shouting as well, having come to the same conclusion as himself. "Step back out of the ring!"

Caliburn stared at them in bemusement and took a tentative step backwards, as the Stones crackled with energy and the air between them began to hum. Sheldrick followed him, then Doyle. Hart stayed where he was.

Above them, the diamond dissolved into blackness as the last of the photosphere disappeared behind the moon's dark void. The brightest stars came out in the clear sky, and the corona, wispy and wraith-like, appeared around the obsidian circle where the sun had been.

Sheldrick crossed the threshold of the circle; Doyle was a few steps behind him. Caliburn looked up at the sky. O'Neill yelled at Hart, but the Sergeant stood still, like a shadowy replica of one of the Stones which encircled them.

Then the ground dissolved, and the Gate opened at their feet.

* * *

The earth liquefied and shifted as the seventy seven feet wide circle of mud and grass and plastic sheeting melted and distorted into a gateway whose perimeter was marked by nineteen pillars of blue fire.

O'Neill watched in horror as Caliburn fell like a brick through wet tissue paper. Someone on the far side of the circle gave a high pitched scream, and he figured that whatever Yarrow and his team had been expecting to happen, it hadn't been this.

Sheldrick was placing his right foot on the solid ground outside the circle when the earth behind him melted to glimmering insubstantiality. He lurched awkwardly, throwing his weight forward as he attempted to keep his balance. He had been lucky; Jack could tell even as he raced around the perimeter towards the Lieutenant that he was just far enough across the boundary to make it on to terra firma. Doyle and Hart had not been so fortunate, and as Sheldrick collapsed and twisted his head and shoulders to look behind him, they began to flounder and sink at the edge of the shimmering sea of blue light. Like men drowning in the shallows, they began to sink.

Sheldrick reached out and grabbed Hart by the arm. Jack skidded down on to his knees at the soldier's side in time to take a firm grip of Doyle's shirt. He grunted with the sudden exertion of bearing the other man's full weight. The Sergeant and the Corporal were being drawn into the vortex as surely as if it were deepest quicksand. Jack felt himself beginning to slide forward on the slippery plastic, and looked around frantically for something with which he could anchor himself. There was nothing.

Teal'c arrived and locked his grip around on Doyle's other arm, relieving part of the burden on Jack. A few feet away, Daniel and Carter were helping Sheldrick as best they could, but Hart was still slipping away from them, the expression on his face one of near-terror. With a sudden cold feeling in his stomach, Jack realised that they were not fighting gravity alone. Whatever force acted on matter entering the wormhole had claimed Hart for its own and would not let him go.

"Rope," he gasped to Carter: "Get rope."

She nodded, understanding, and disappeared, leaving Sheldrick and Daniel participating in a losing tug-of-war over Hart.

Jack and Teal'c were fairing better with Doyle: whatever tides and eddies swirled in the forces under the Gate's surface seemed to have momentarily cancelled each other out, and the pulling force they were exerting on him was succeeding in raising him up out of the whirlpool. "Teal'c-" Jack readied himself: "On three. One. Two- pull!"

They pulled, and Doyle yelled in surprise and pain as his shoulder was wrenched upwards. But they had won, and together they hauled him on to the grass and rolled him away from the lip of the pool.

Jack indicated Hart, and nodded to Teal'c. "Him next. We can..."

But it was too late. He turned in time to see Hart's terrified face slip underneath the dancing false waters.

"Shit," said Sheldrick. "Shit, shit, shit..."

"I found rope," reported Carter, returning with a thick coil slung over her shoulder.

"Too late," said Daniel, shaking his head.

"We could pull them back up."

"The Gates work only in one direction."

"But this isn't a Gate, and we just pulled a man who was half way through it out again."

"If we threw down a rope..."

"There isn't enough time," interrupted O'Neill. Around him, Carter, Daniel and Teal'c fell silent. He pointed at the sky above them, where the corona around the inky blackness of totality was fading. In seconds, the diamond ring would reappear on the far side of the disk, and the eclipse would be over. "Totality lasts just over two minutes. Who wants to bet that in thirty seconds this Gate- or whatever the hell it is- shuts down until the next total eclipse passes this way sometime in the next century? We don't have time to get those men back up here." He stopped. "We do have time to join them."

Daniel stared at him, horrified. "Join them?"

Jack nodded. "They don't know what's happened to them. They don't know where they are. Even if they landed a hundred yards from a real Stargate, they wouldn't know how to use it to get home. We're their best chance of getting back."

"But this isn't a Stargate." Carter spoke quickly, rushing the words as the seconds ticked by. "There's no guarantee that they've gone somewhere on the Gate network. And if they haven't, we'd only be stranding ourselves as well."

Jack looked at her. "Which is why you're not coming, Captain. If we can't get back here from there, you'll have to figure out a way of getting to us."

"Sir, that might not be possible- "

"You'll think of something, Captain," Jack told her with a confidence which he hoped sounded more convincing in her ears than his own. He faced Daniel and Teal'c. "I won't leave those men stranded for the rest of their lives without ever knowing why. We can get them home. We can get us home." He grinned, and heard the manic edge in his voice. "Volunteers?"

Teal'c nodded.

"Daniel, I'll need you to work out how to dial us home when we find a Gate."

"If we find a Gate."

"This is why the Air Force pays your life insurance premiums."

"You know, your good ideas are okay, but your bad ideas really stink." Daniel lifted his hands to his head and pushed them back through his hair.

"Fifteen seconds," said Jack. "No pressure or anything."

Daniel shut his eyes, opened them again. "Next time I ask for an extra twelve hours somewhere to study something in more detail..."

"Twenty four," said Jack, "Scout's honour. And I won't even complain about being bored." Then he stepped over the edge of the circle. He had vanished before the last syllable of geronimo had made it past his lips.

Teal'c turned to Carter. "We will return," he said. Then he too disappeared.

Daniel hesitated by the maelstrom's edge. "If there's no Gate there, it's up to you."

Sam nodded. "I'll think of something."

Daniel shut his eyes, and jumped.

The Gate closed.

The first shafts of post-eclipse light hit the hills, scattering shadows and flooding the indigo sky with the red-orange light of a false dawn. On the opposite side of the circle of stones, a technician was having hysterics. Yarrow was standing staring at the ground inside the circle, as silent and immobile as one of the granite pillars which flanked him. And Mr Pinker watched everything, with an alert and all-embracing gaze.

Sam knelt beside Doyle, and began automatically to administer first aid to his shoulder. Beside him, Sheldrick was staring at the dewy meadow grass which grew in the space where a moment before there had been a swirling blue nothing, swearing continuously under his breath.

"Sure," she repeated to herself, "I'll think of something."

Part II
The Keltoi

One

For some reason, Wizard of Oz references formed the basis of the most popular running jokes around the SGC. Sinking feet first through the darkness- well, it felt feet-first, although Sam would have argued that gravity had no more influence during transference than it did outside the Earth's atmosphere- Daniel was inclined to think that in this instance Alice in Wonderland would have been more appropriate.

He was falling slowly, so slowly that the experience had more in common with a gentle parachute drop to earth than the heady, plummeting thrill of being sucked through the Gate that he had come to expect. He also had the sensation of being in an enclosed space or tunnel, and he briefly entertained the possibility that what they had stumbled across was not a Gate but simply a very, very deep hole, and any minute now he would pop out somewhere in the Australian outback. It would be no stranger than a lot of the things that had happened to him in the past couple of years.

There was a light somewhere below him. He hoped kangaroos were friendly.

With a sound which was almost a pop a green grassy mat too lush and verdant to be Antipodal appeared underneath him. Just in time, he recalled one class from the endless round of training courses the Air Force had made him take, and tucked his legs up to his chest, and prepared to roll with the impact.

Whumph.

Daniel hit the ground with something which was less of a controlled rolling motion and more of an arms-flailing, legs-kicking tumble; but it achieved its purpose, and when he came to an eventual halt, flat out on his back and staring at the rippling blue expanse above him, he was bruised and winded but nothing worse.

Overhead, the shimmering gateway broke apart and dissipated, leaving him with a clear view of the sky, whose flat blue expanse was punctuated by a flotilla of white, nebulous clouds.

"Daniel? You okay?"

He opened his mouth to respond to O'Neill's urgent inquiry, but nothing more than a thin wheeze emerged. The fall had knocked off the mylar goggles, but had protected his glasses for long enough that they had not parted company from his face until he had slowed down considerably. A brief search in the grass around nearby located them and a quick inspection revealed that the lenses were undamaged. With a sigh of relief, Daniel replaced them and blinked in the bright sunshine, and attempted to sit up. He allowed O'Neill to help him.

"Danny, are you injured?"

"No..." he wheezed, and managed a weak grin: "Although after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs."

Apparently O'Neill hadn't read Alice in Wonderland recently. His expression creased with deepening concern. "Hell, you're concussed. Okay, sit there and I'll..."

"It's all right. I'm okay. Just a little bruised." Daniel looked up and down the grassy bank which had taken the brunt of the impact. Caliburn was standing up, a hand to his head, which he was shaking slowly as if the world around them was an optical illusion which could be cleared if he blinked rapidly enough. Teal'c was attending to Sergeant Hart, who had been less fortunate than Daniel in the angle at which he hit the ground. "Where are we?"

Jack pulled Daniel to his feet.

"God knows. But I don't think we're in Kansas any more."

* * *

Carter spent most of Wednesday afternoon yelling.

As the stars disappeared and the sky flooded with the golden translucent rays of the re-emerging sun, she yelled at the stunned scientists and archaeologists on Yarrow's team until one of the long-haired technicians stumbled into life to help her administer first aid to Sheldrick and Doyle. Neither of the soldiers was badly injured, but both were exhibiting symptoms of shock, which was hardly surprising. They had, after all, just watched two of their comrades being literally swallowed up by the ground, and had narrowly escaped the same fate themselves.

Next, she shouted for an air ambulance to take the SAS men to the nearest military hospital, then for a helicopter to take herself and Yarrow after them. She raised her voice with the terrified Lance Corporal who was sent to placate her, with the result that she was reassured that a secure communications channel with the MOD in London would be waiting for her on arrival at the closest RAF base. Then she shouted for coffee. The tactic seemed to have worked so far, and it seemed a pity to stop while she was ahead.

Her father would have called it an SLT. Strategic Loss of Temper. Not to be indulged in on a regular basis, but damned effective in the right circumstances.

She was finishing the last dregs of the coffee as the late afternoon sun dipped behind the distant low hills. The campers, distant dots of day-glow orange and yellow, were dismantling their tents, packing up their caravans. She was glad her route out of Cornwall would be air-borne: the roads leading east would be as impassable for the next twenty four hours as the roads west had been during the previous twenty four. She looked behind her at the quiet, sleeping Stones. Show's over folks. Move along. Nothing to see here now.

A sudden angry impulse made her crush the empty polystyrene cup in her fist. In front of her, a sycamore seed twirled through the still air towards the ground, its twin green blades designed by nature's symmetry to carry it as far from its parent tree as possible. Sam watched it distractedly, absorbed by other thoughts, until a sudden gust of wind knocked the seed beyond her sight. She looked up, and saw the Chinook which had been summoned for them descending rapidly. The helicopter was a kind of mechanical sycamore seed made by human hands.

She frowned, and looked back at the Stones again. Sycamore seeds and helicopters. Why did that thought bother her?

The roar of the settling Chinook was loud in her ears now, disrupting her concentration. Yarrow hurried towards her, down the rough muddy path which led away from the Maidens. "Where's Pinker?" called Sam, vocal chords fighting the tide of noise from behind her.

Yarrow looked about himself. "I don't know. I haven't seen him. You don't suppose he...?"

Sam shook her head. Whatever else had happened to Pinker, she was certain he had not fallen through the open wormhole. She guessed the little spook had far too well-developed a sense of self-preservation for that. She replayed the events of the morning in her head, and realised that the last time she had seen him had been in the confusion just after totality. Amidst the general air of hysteria, Pinker had been calmly standing by himself, making a series of low-voiced, urgent-toned calls into his cellphone.

So much for the Colonel's injunction to say nothing. They must have provided the spook with enough material to fill a dozen highly confidential reports. But if he had scurried off to brief his superiors, at least Sam would not have to deal with him again. That seemed to be the only good point to have arisen from the eclipse debacle.

The Chinook's blades slowed and stilled. "C'mon," she said to Yarrow: "Let's go."

She paused before climbing into the aircraft's belly, somehow compelled to look back at the Stones once more before departing. The circle of Maidens in the open field mocked her; sleeping now, they clutched their secrets close to their still, stone hearts.

It had taken years to unlock the Stargate's mysteries. She doubted the Colonel could be so patient.

* * *

"Where the bloody hell did everybody go?"

"They didn't go anywhere," said O'Neill. "We're the ones who've moved."

Hart, who had posed the question, stared at O'Neill in consternation, then turned to Caliburn, as if making an appeal to a higher, more rational power.

Rhys rubbed at his temple; he had sustained a painful blow to his neck and shoulder when he had- landed? Yes, that felt like the right word, he had certainly fallen some distance- when he had landed, and the pain was unfurling into hot, elongated tendrils inside the muscles behind his ears. He wouldn't be able to turn his head easily tomorrow.

In the meantime, he didn't understand what the American colonel was talking about. Rhys was sitting, with the four other men, in the centre of the nineteen granite Stones. The apparatus and other scientific paraphernalia which had disturbed the ancient dignity of the site had been removed, along with all evidence of the large team of people who had been there not ten minutes earlier.

That didn't make sense. Perhaps he had lost consciousness; that would account for the site being cleared so completely without his knowledge. But in that case, why had they been left behind?

"Look at this place," O'Neill said. "Does that look like Merrie Olde Englande to you?"

Rhys had to admit that he had a point. The ground inside the circle was dusty and dry, but beyond the circumference which the stones defined, the dense vegetation of what seemed to be a tropical forest pushed in from all around. Large-leafed plants swayed and dipped in the warm, moist breeze and somewhere high in the tree canopy a bird jabbered and called with a high-pitched squawk which was unlike anything Rhys had ever heard in the Home Counties. He half expected David Attenborough to appear through the foliage at any second.

He looked at O'Neill who, apparently satisfied that he had got his attention, continued: "Okay. This is going to sound a little kooky, but bear with me. We fell through a wormhole, a kind of a rip-"

"Or aperture-"

"Not helpful, Danny."

"Sorry."

"-a kind of a rip in space. It's like, ahh, a worm burrowing through an apple. Hence the term wormhole. Leastways, that's how it was explained to me." He paused. "Look, we're on another planet. Deal with it."

Rhys stared at them: the Colonel, the anxious-looking archaeologist, and the silent black man. Lunatics, he thought. We've been kidnapped by lunatics.

O'Neill turned to Jackson. "How was that?"

"Honest opinion? You were doing well up to the last part. Then I felt you lost the tone a little."

"Carter's better at this kind of thing," admitted O'Neill.

"Captain Carter is still on Earth."

"Yes, Teal'c, I know she's still-"

Caliburn was still processing the previous sentence. One part of it stuck out in his mind. "...on Earth?" he echoed.

O'Neill nodded, as to a slow and somewhat backward child. "We left her in Cornwall."

"This is Cornwall," protested Hart.

"Am I going to have to do my B-movie mad scientist explanation again? We are not in Cornwall-"

"Excuse me," interrupted Daniel.

"We are not in England-"

"Umm, perhaps if we all looked at the sky-"

"We're not even in Europe-"

"Everyone look up!" commanded Daniel.

Rhys looked up. The sun was low in the sky, and rising from the opposite horizon was a full, blue-tinged moon.

He stared. Make that moons.

The second satellite was a smaller version of its dominant companion, but the shadowy pock marks of the craters which marred its surface could just be seen with the naked eye, and there was no doubt about what it was.

Rhys shut his eyes against the sight, and breathed deeply. The thick, damp air which filled his nostrils bore the scent of exposed earth, the fragrances of flowering plants, and something else. The air was infused with something indefinably different, and it told Caliburn that he did not belong here.

This was not home. Not anything like it.

"Oh fuck," said Hart. "Oh fuck, fuck, fuck..."

He was staring into space, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels. Rhys could empathise with the reaction- he was sorely tempted to join in- but he could not allow it. "Knock it off, Sergeant," he said sharply, trying to project an assurance and authority he did not feel.

"But we're... it's... this isn't..." Hart looked at him, his pleading red-rimmed eyes glistening in the half-light.

Rhys placed a hand on his shoulder and said, more gently, "Derek. Del. We're here. We're not injured. We're not in immediate danger." He looked up at O'Neill. "And we're about to get a full explanation for exactly what the hell just happened. Right, Colonel?"

O'Neill sat back, and nodded. "Right."

* * *

Carter waited until the helicopter was under way before tackling Yarrow.

"So what were you expecting to happen this morning, Professor?"

He looked at her, eyes almost as wild and floating as his shock of white hair. Sheldrick and Doyle weren't the only ones whose stress-bearing mechanisms had been tried by the day's events. Ordinarily, Sam would have had more sympathy towards the man, but she needed answers and was feeling more than a little strung out herself. Yarrow wasn't the one who had had to stand by and watch his closest friends vanish to a place from which it was not altogether certain that return was possible.

Dammit, she wouldn't allow herself to think like that.

Yarrow's hands twisted together in front of his chest. "I didn't... we weren't..."

"Professor," she insisted.

He took a deep breath. "Electromagnetic fields."

"What about them?"

"They are particularly strong in the area around Falmouth. I had a survey performed and found..." He unlaced his fingers and made a circular motion with one hand, before tapping the centre of the imaginary ring with the other: "...that the fields are focused around the Maidens. Since the fields fluctuate with the effects of gravity, the phases of the moon and so on, and since Dr Jackson's theories had made me wonder if the circle had been constructed as part of a star map, I speculated that there might be some measurable effect on the fields during an event of such astronomical significance as a total eclipse." He gave a hollow laugh: "There was."

Carter stared at him. "You weren't expecting that to happen? You don't know what it was?"

Yarrow looked up, startled. "My word, who could have anticipated... Of course not." His eyes narrowed. "Did you?"

"No," said Carter.

The Professor gazed at her in confusion. "Then why did you come?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I was told that you- I mean, the American military- wanted to be present at the tests."

"Who told you that?"

"The gentleman from the Ministry. Mr Pinker."

Sam thought about that. "The symbol you found engraved on the Stones. Do you know what it is?"

"Well, no," he said, puzzled. "That's what I was hoping you could tell me. Mr Pinker said it was your area of expertise."

"Mr Pinker told you a lot of things, didn't he?"

The Professor frowned. "No," he said shortly. "Not really."

That figured. Carter would have pressed for more information, but any further conversation was made impossible by the increasing roar of the Chinook's engine as it climbed into the air and bore them east, over the idyllic, crowded fields.

Two

"So, you do this kind of thing on a regular basis?"

"Pretty much every week."

Caliburn nodded, taking this in, and gazed into the flames of the campfire they had built. Mr Teal'c, it seemed, was a man of few words but many talents. When the night had begun to draw in, it had not taken him long to find and use a small fragment of flint to kindle a fire from the dry wood the others had found around the circle. The jungle's muggy heat had prompted everyone to shed a layer of clothing, and Teal'c had abandoned his hat, revealing a prominent gold tattoo in the middle of his forehead. It was almost a brand on his dark skin, and Caliburn added one more item to the day's excessively long list of peculiarities.

The fire crackled. He traced the paths of individual sparks in the rising plume upwards in the smoke until they died away somewhere among the unfamiliar patterns of the stars overhead.

The glance upwards was unwise. It prompted another stab of longing for home which he fought to repress. He dug his fingers into the dry soil so hard that he could feel sharp fragments of rock gouging his skin. "If you knew this was going to happen you might have said something about it."

"We didn't know," said Jackson. Of the three Americans, he seemed most eager to answer Rhys' questions. "We didn't think it was possible. There's a whole host of factors Stargates have that the Maidens don't. They're made of a mineral not found on earth, they have control devices nearby, they..."

"What Daniel is saying, albeit somewhat long-windedly," broke in O'Neill, "is that as far as we knew, you can't make a Stargate by throwing a few rocks together."

Rhys raised an eyebrow. "Apparently one can."

"You don't say," returned O'Neill drily.

"So how do we get back?" asked Hart. His nervousness had not abated, which disturbed Caliburn. He had never seen the Sergeant so seriously rattled by anything. But he was at least managing to sound calm.

"Two possibilities," said the Colonel: "Option one: Carter works out how the Stones in Cornwall operate, in which case all we have to do is stay put until she does."

"And failing that?" <