STARGATE SG-1 29 Hall of the Two Truths (30 page)

“My companions were Bra’tac and Rya’c,” added Teal’c, reflectively. “In retrospect, I do not believe they were authentic either, although at the time I thought otherwise.”

“Wait — so you’re saying that the Carter I just spent the last two days thinking was a Goa’uld, wasn’t?” That headache was starting to come back.

“Oh she probably was a Goa’uld, she just wasn’t — you know — Sam,” clarified Daniel. “None of them were real. Or, at least, they weren’t the people they pretended to be. I’m pretty sure they were real enough otherwise.”

“So, how do we know we’re all the real us now?” Jack looked from face to face. Now that he’d caught up, what Daniel said made sense. If he really was Daniel, which he was if Jack trusted Teal’c. Who probably wasn’t compromised, but could be. In which case, then Carter maybe wasn’t herself either.

Yeah. His head was definitely hurting.

The others were all looking at one another. Finally Daniel spoke. “I guess we don’t, Jack. We’re just going to have to trust each other.”

Jack looked at each one of them: Teal’c, Daniel, Carter. Familiar faces, acting and talking like he’d expect them to. It felt right. Not like before, when everything had felt wrong.

Fine. He’d go with his gut on this one. He just hoped to hell his gut was right.

Lowering his weapon all the way, he rested one arm on top of its stock.

“Okay. I can do that.” The smile came fairly easily. “By the way, good to see you, kids.”

Carter’s face relaxed into a slight smile as well and Teal’c inclined his head. Daniel, Jack could tell, was already a million miles away, his brow creased in thought.

“Well, the good news is, I guess we’re not dead after all,” Jack pushed on. “So anybody have any idea what the hell is going on here?”

Daniel raised a finger. “I think I do.”

Why did that not surprise him? “Care to share with the rest of the class?”

“This all started when we were ‘killed’ back in that cavern by those two Goa’uld.”

“NebtHet and Aset,” provided Teal’c.

Daniel nodded. “NebtHet was an Ancient Egyptian Goddess of the Dead. According to mythology, she and Aset welcomed the dead to the underworld and stood guard at either end of their funeral bier in the tomb. If you think about it, there’s a certain logic between those personas and what happened here. Obviously, they’re the ones behind all this.”

“But what exactly
is
this?” Carter sounded just as confused as Jack felt. Good. At least he wasn’t the only one not quite tracking.

“Sha’re — the fake Sha’re — kept insisting we were on a journey to the Hall of the Two Truths.”

That sounded familiar. “Yeah, what is that?” Carter asked. “Martouf kept talking about it too.”

“It’s also from Egyptian mythology. It’s the Hall of Judgment where the deceased were to be deemed worthy or not to enter the afterlife.”

“Except, we’re not the deceased. Are we?” Jack added. The fake Carter had finally given that up, but still, it didn’t hurt to check.

“I’m pretty sure a sarcophagus was used to revive us all, sir,” the real Carter replied. “That is, if we were even dead in the first place.”

Jack shoved the images from the cavern back into the dark corners of his mind. Oh yeah. They’d been dead all right.

“Whatever happened to us,” Daniel went on, “I’m fairly certain we were meant to believe we were dead, and on some kind of journey through the underworld.”

“Bra’tac told me that I had died. As had he and Rya’c,” Teal’c offered solemnly. There was just a touch of something in his voice that made Jack give him a sideways glance, but the Jaffa appeared as stoic as ever.

“Yeah, Sha’re tried to convince me I was dead too,” mused Daniel. He looked at Carter. She was nodding.

“Martouf said the same thing.” Carter looked like she was about to say more but decided against it. In the near dawn light, Jack thought he saw her face redden slightly. He could only imagine what kind of mind games they’d tried on Carter if they’d conjured up Marty’s ghost. Bastards.

The others were looking at him, he realized, to confirm their theory.

“Well, you know me, I always believe everything Carter tells me. So, yeah, I thought I was dead there too. For a while. At least until her eyes did that whole glowing thing.” He cringed at the memory.

“But
how
did they do it?” Carter’s face was taut with concentration. “I get that they were able to make themselves look like people we knew, but how did they get everything so accurate? All the information? Stuff no one would ever know unless they
were
the person they pretended to be?”

Daniel was shaking his head. “I don’t know, Sam. But the more important question, I think, is why? What do NebtHet and the others want with us, that they’d go to these lengths to get it?”

“Does it matter why?” asked Jack. “Look, we’re all together now. I say we just find a way off this rock and the hell with the Hall of the Two Whatevers.”

“Two Truths,” Daniel corrected.

“
Whatever
,” Jack threw back.

“If Martouf — the fake Martouf — is to be believed, then there is a Stargate on this planet,” Sam said. “There was a gateway that supposedly would have taken me there.”

“But you ended up here instead?” Daniel asked.

Carter flushed a little. “Long story.” She gave a rueful smile. “Look, the colonel’s right. We need to just get out of here. Martouf told me that the Goa’uld who live here can’t leave this place — their physiology is dependent upon the naquadah in the planet’s core.” She took a deep breath. “Apparently they need someone who can design a way for them to leave and still survive, and they’re willing to use whatever leverage they can to make that happen. We need to get through the Stargate before they find out we’ve managed to escape. According to Martouf, these guys make Apophis and the other System Lords look like guardian angels.”

Daniel, Jack noticed, was shaking his head again.

“I don’t think we did escape, Sam,” he said in that solemn voice that always preceded what was sure to be bad news. “And I wouldn’t trust the story Martouf told you either. I think there’s something else going on here, something we haven’t figured out yet. I’m pretty sure this is just part of the whole journey. They wanted us here, like this, so we can all go to the Hall of Judgment together.”

“For what reason, Daniel Jackson?” said Teal’c.

“I honestly don’t know, Teal’c,” Daniel shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

“No. We won’t,” said Jack, curtly, shifting his weapon. “Because we’re not going.” He didn’t give a damn about the ‘why’. It was obvious now — they were nothing but rats in someone’s maze. Well, he was done being a lab rat. And his people were done too. “If Carter’s right, and there’s a Stargate on this planet, then
that’s
where we’re headed. The Hall of Two Truths, or whatever the hell it’s called, is going to have to wait until I’m really dead.”

“But Jack,” Daniel objected, “we have no idea where the Stargate is. Last thing I knew, I was in a desert — and suddenly I woke up in some place that looks like the ruins of a gothic cathedral. Who knows where the gate might actually be?”

There was a simple answer to that. “Carter knows. Right?”

Jack saw her grimace. That was never a good sign.

“Sorry, sir. But no, I haven’t a clue. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this place and I honestly wouldn’t even begin to know which way to go.”

“But you said there were two doorways — so if one came here and the other went to the Stargate, let’s just go back and take the other one.” It seemed straightforward enough, but by the look on Carter’s face Jack had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“I don’t think we can, sir. They weren’t ordinary doorways. I think they had some kind of transporter mechanism in them. When I went through, it was a similar sensation to using the rings.” She looked apologetic. “I don’t know what happened after that. I woke up back there just a while ago.” She indicated the general direction from which she’d come. “I think, maybe, I was out for quite a while.”

“I too experienced a similar sensation when I chose the Red Gate,” Teal’c told them. “The experience was unusual, but as Major Carter pointed out, not unlike the transportation rings. I would not be surprised if they shared a similar origin.”

“Ancient technology,” Carter clarified.

“Indeed.”

She nodded. “That would explain a lot.”

Jack was lost. “Carter?”

“Sir, we know that the technology the Goa’uld use is only a fraction of what the Ancients must have constructed. I mean, look at the Ancient Repository of Knowledge. Its contents are so vast the human brain is incapable of containing all of it, let alone comprehending it.”

“Tell me,” he inserted, dryly. She smiled a bit.

“Who knows what else the Ancients might have developed, or what the capability of that technology might be? Daniel was in a desert; I woke up and found myself in the middle of a blizzard.” She looked at Teal’c.

“I was in an environment that very much resembled Chulak.”

“Yeah. Well, I woke up in Vancouver. It rained almost the whole time,” Jack said, irritably. “What’s your point?”

“I’m just saying, sir, that whoever is behind all of this — and whatever their purpose is — I’ll wager they’re using Ancient technology to make it all happen.”

Jack sighed. There were days when he wished he had retained even a fraction of what the Asgard had taken out of his head. Maybe then he could at least keep up. At the moment, though, he still wasn’t sure where this left them.

“Good for them,” he tossed out, wryly. “But again, I ask — what’s the point? So they used Ancient tech to gaslight us. How does that help us find the Stargate?”

Carter looked crestfallen. “I guess it doesn’t,” she admitted. “But my point was, since I think we’re now talking about some kind of transporter device being used in those gateways, then the Stargate could really be anywhere. Anywhere on the entire planet.”

“Ah.” Well. That certainly took the wind out of their sails. Jack took a deep breath and released it slowly. It sounded like it was time for Plan B.

If only he had one.

“Look, I know you don’t like the idea, Jack, but I think our only option is to keep playing along and see where this all ends up,” Daniel said. “Once we find out why this has happened to us, then maybe we’ll be able to figure out a way to get home. But until we know the purpose to all of this, I think going off half-cocked is only going to make the situation just that much more difficult.”

Daniel probably had a point, even though it didn’t sit particularly well with Jack. Something about being some Goa’uld’s lab experiment just rubbed him the wrong way. He looked at Carter.

“What about you? You’re the one with the story about the uber-evil Goa’uld. Won’t we be playing right into their hands if we keep heading to this Two Truths place?”

Carter thought for a moment. “I don’t know, sir.” She sounded tired. “At the time, Martouf’s explanation made sense. But given what Daniel said, I’m pretty sure now that all of it was a lie. I shouldn’t have let myself fall for any of it.”

Jack’s anger simmered again at how the Martouf doppelganger must have manipulated her. Sons of bitches.

“I agree with Daniel Jackson,” offered Teal’c, in the awkward moment that followed Carter’s admission. “There is a purpose to all of this which we must uncover. It would diminish the ordeal each of us has been through were we to never understand why we were forced to endure such difficulties.”

“Et tu, Teal’c?” Jack groaned, but the Jaffa merely looked at him somberly and he remembered again what Teal’c had said about believing Rya’c to be dead. And Daniel had just spent the past few days with his dead wife.

In retrospect, maybe he’d gotten off easy, all things considered.

And maybe finding out who was responsible wouldn’t be a bad thing either. He’d have a word or two to say to them, when he did.

“Fine. We’ll follow the breadcrumbs.” Under his breath he added, “Let’s just hope we don’t end up in someone’s pot of stew.”

At least the light was better now. Dawn had brought up the dimmer switch as they’d been talking. However, it did nothing to illuminate which way they needed to go. After several days of having only a single path to follow, it was odd that this, of all places, should have none. The four of them made short recons, all within hailing distance — Jack wasn’t about to lose track of them again — but there was no obvious path anywhere.

“West,” said Daniel finally. “I think we should go west.”

“Random?” Jack asked.

Daniel shook his head. “No. In the Ancient Egyptian belief system, the west was always the direction of the land of the dead. Toward the setting sun. So it makes sense that we ought to keep going west if we’re going to reach the Hall of the Two Truths.”

Jack looked at the other two for input, but Teal’c seemed to have no opinion and Carter just shrugged.

“Great. Then west it is,” he decided. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.