Daniel
We stepped through the stone arches into the caves and an uneasy feeling washed over me. I turned to Sam and she shared the same eerie look. We continued walking though ignoring the gnawing in our guts, our headlamps lighting up the gravely pathway. Our boots echoed and crunched with each step, none of us saying a word. As we kept walking I noticed the walls of the cave were marked with what appeared to be primitive drawings, but the further we ventured the more detailed they became, including words. I stopped to read them and my pulse quickened.
"Daniel," Sam called for me and I still stood there, looking around the dirt curves and down at the floor. These were not just words but last words, calls for help, finally goodbyes.
"Stop walking." My voice was low as I bent down and inspected the gravel we had been traveling on. Fragments of bone shards, teeth, all scattered around us. Jack walked over and I showed him the shards of bone beneath us.
"Don't like that," he shook his head.
"Why didn't they just leave?" Sam asked after I showed them the words painted in a burnt red against the cold gray stones.
"I don't know, but we need to get the device before we end up like them." Jack motioned and we continued deeper into the caverns. The farther we walked the larger the bone pieces became, seeing entire femurs and skulls scattered along the path.
We had reached what appeared to be the end of the caves. A rough circular wall with grooves carved into it, each groove was etched into a maze of patterns from the top of the circle and flowing down to the bottom into the ground. There was a simple wooden table with vials of sand, water, air, and I looked back at the wall and saw the instructions carved there in Ancient.
"Alright Daniel, crack on with your puzzle." Jack sighed and leaned against the wall.
"It's alchemy." I grimaced looking over the jars. "We'll have to pour these into the right channels carved into the wall to create the element to solve the puzzle."
"And if we don't?" Jack crossed his arms and looked back at the table.
"I imagine, we end up like the less fortunate ones scattered in the gravel path we walked on." I stared back at the puzzle. "It's never an easy task is it?" I muttered more to myself and began pouring.
Eleanor
The hike to the caverns was an overgrown uphill trek from the museum, but I took the time to speak with the two guards that accompanied us. Sjorn and Plath had worked for the Eldress Amothe for seven years each. She was the elected high council member for the region, and they filled me in on their history. Anything that I could soak in to keep my nerves steady, to keep my mind from wandering to the worse, that Daniel and the others had died years ago. I appreciated the experience to hear the backgrounds of their people. It was the exact reason I had joined the SGC and now after over a year I was in the field, something I had never anticipated.
Around the time that we suspected SG-1 had landed, the region had just rebuilt after a second major recorded war. They were comparable to America's gilded age, full of promise for the future. Then, somehow time had passed and another war had broken out, this time it was more destructive with advancements in technology both helping the progress of the three countries that made this planet, and hindering them with their acts of aggression towards one another. In this time of peace now, Sjorn and Plath were worried that their home would fall prey again with information of the gate opening spreading. The other two nations would assume they had kept this information locked from them, and the religious zealots in the area who still believed the gate and MALPs were artifacts from the gods would be outraged.
"Doesn't help that you were walking around a children's museum dedicated to peace and meeting of the three cultures fully armed with your weapons." Plath added and I had to agree with him.
We came to the entrance of the caverns. There were stone boulders piling up the mouth of the cave, the carvings in Ancient had been defaced over the years. Nguyen took out a small pack of C4 and placed it at the entrance of the caves. She tried to call on her walkie to SG-1 but there was no answer. We took cover and after no response blasted the entrance clear. Sjorn and Plath refused to go in with us, though they didn't agree that the caves belonged to any cosmic power, they still were raised on ghost stories of it as children and felt better outside. We understood and started our way in.
As we were walking deeper into the caves I thought to give them my walkie, in case they needed to get a hold of us they could contact us back. I went to the mouth of the cave and there was nothing there, no entrance, no one waiting in the woods, just more rocks. As if it had crumbled again around trapping us in. When I ran back to Nguyen to tell her, her face dropped.
"So, we face the same fate as SG-1," Brookes groaned, "typical."
Nguyen suggested we keep walking. As we did I noticed paintings on the walls, deep wine colored notations and soon words formed along with them.
"Alright anthropologist, read them." Brookes gestured and I explained that wasn't my field of expertise either. He let out another moan and trudged forward.
The farther we walked, bones began appearing along with the words stained into the walls. There was a once leather backpack next to a mostly decomposed rotting body. I stopped and shuffled through their contents as the team checked other bodies. I found a journal, food ration wrappers, and bandages. I said a silent prayer on deaf ears for the bodies rotting there in the caves. They didn't appear to be people here looking to cause trouble, if anything they were packed with food and comfort items. If I had to guess, they seemed to be using the tunnels as a safety measure. Based on the decomposition it may have been from the final years of the last war. I took the journal, unable to read it, and placed it in my own pack as we continued with no sign of SG-1.
At the end of an hour walk we saw a small tunnel with a glowing light emanating from it, guiding us to it. There was what appeared to be a large vault door with grooves and passages etched into the front. Each groove spilling liquids and dirt into one another and back into canisters resting into the bottom of the vault. I traced the grooves lightly seeing where liquid metals meld into thick rock, into oils and waters and finally my eyes were caught back onto the light peeking from behind the door. Brookes pulled the vault open and we saw them.
Colonel O'Neill's hand was clutched around an object resting on a glowing platform. Teal'c was standing still, like a mighty sequoia unmoving. Daniel and Sam both were suspended, lunging in the colonel's direction. All four of them were frozen in time, perfectly preserved.
"Well now what?" Brookes muttered and Nguyen turned to look at me.
"You're the brains here." She said, "what do we do?"
"Again, this isn't exactly my specialty." I whispered as I walked around the team examining their forms.
"No, it's his," she pointed at Daniel, mid leap in the air, hair standing stiff and expression of worry frozen on his face. "But, we have you and if he thought you were good enough to help him figure this out, you have some level of knowledge."
That's when it clicked, and I gasped. "The device, it's supposed to help find a solar flare comparable to a ring you'd jump through. Like a remote to guide you from one wormhole to another jumping until you end at the address you want. The crystal at the SGC stabilizes it though. So, currently it's unstable." I walked over to Colonel O'Neill and saw his fingers grazing on the device. "I have a theory, and it could be radically incorrect as I'm no astrophysicist, but I think the device is connected to the gate here. It's unstable and it is looking for a homing beacon, the gate. It's created a time dilation funnel directly from the gate to here. Every time the gate has been dialed, the planet has fast forwarded through their cultural evolution decades, centuries, in a span of a week to us back on Earth. SG-1 has been maintained here in this stasis field at the pinpoint of the cone out."
"But the question still remains, how do we get them out?" She asked.
"We are variables from the outside of this time field, it should be as easy as just interacting with it," I flicked the thin metal oval carved object no larger than O'Neill's palm away from his grasp and Sam and Daniel fell with a thump to the ground. "Hello sir," I smiled sheepishly at Colonel O'Neill and he looked around the room in surprise.
"What are you doing here?" His eyes went back to me and Nguyen quickly explained the rescue mission. I told Sam my theory and she agreed, finding it unsettling but the best option for an explanation we had. The question of how to safely now remove the device from the planet remained. Sam estimated that any interaction with the device caused it to glitch and focus its energy on their time stasis. When the ring was moved from its original placement the funnel snapped. She carefully picked up the device again and we stayed the same.
We made our way out of the caverns, Nguyen expressing her concern with the lack of an exit we had discovered when we first entered the cave, but it was nothing that a combination of C4 and determination couldn't fix. I filled in Sam and Daniel on the rapid time changes since they had interacted with the groundskeeper on the walk. When we made it to the end of the caverns, the rocks were gone, the entrance was open but no one stood waiting for us.
"I imagine they left," I shrugged, "after four hours they believed we had died like everyone else in the caves."
The sun had set low and the smattering of stars sprinkled the incandescent night. I gasped when I saw the three moons all triangulated across the sky, one bright pink and two a mellowed white. A weight was lifted off me knowing that we had all made it okay, and I could finally appreciate the beauty of a planet that I never knew existed, here before me. Three beautiful moons and a thriving population filled with a rich history and customs all their own.
"How was your first trip off-world?" Daniel asked, smiling in my direction as we walked along the tree thick trails guided by the moons. I looked onward at Colonel O'Neill and Major Nguyen discussing how we would get back to the gate, Sam and the other three members of the rescue team going over the scientific logistics of the time paradox we found ourselves in, and Teal'c solitarily admiring the night sky as well.
"Nothing like I had anticipated." I laughed back as we made our way home.