They came through the gate into bright sunlight, grassland stretching out around them as far as Daniel could see. The grass was amber rather than green, seed heads swaying in the wind that the jumper kicked up. The distant horizon swam with heat.
“All right, listen up, I’m only going to say this once,” Rodney said.
Sheppard spoke up from the pilot’s seat. “Promise?”
“No.” It was easy banter, comfortable, and it made Daniel wish for a moment that his own team was there. He hadn’t been able to justify why he needed SG-1 on this mission — it had been hard enough making a case for him to stay and continue his research rather than going back to work — but he wished Sam were there. Although of course Sam wasn’t on SG-1 anymore.
“This planet has a high-oxygen atmosphere,” Rodney went on. “Anything that burns here is going to burn fast and hot. Anything that strikes a spark is extremely likely to start a fire. These?” He held up his P90. “Likely to strike sparks.”
“We get it,” John said. “No weapons fire unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“My gun doesn’t fire bullets,” Ronon said.
“No, it fires directed energy. Did what I just said make that sound like a better idea to you?”
“We will not fire except as a last resort,” Teyla said. She glanced at Daniel, as if making certain that he was paying attention, and he nodded.
“Got it.”
“Hopefully there won’t be anything to shoot at,” John said.
“Hostile wildlife,” Rodney said, as if John might have forgotten.
“Thousands of years ago. Maybe they’ve moved on. Dr. Jackson, any idea where we should be looking for your archaeological site?”
“The records mentioned a river near the gate.”
“For some definition of ‘near,’” Rodney said.
Ronon rolled his eyes at him. “It’s not like we’re having to walk.”
Jinx, Jack would have said. Daniel shook his head, wondering why he was thinking about the early years of his team rather than the actual team he’d left behind. He wasn’t nostalgic for those days, he told himself. Nostalgic for the people he’d worked with then, maybe, but not actually for those early days of blundering in the dark, making lethal mistakes more often than they solved problems.
They hadn’t even known what questions to ask, then, and there had been no time to look for answers that weren’t immediately useful. Now, finally, he had the luxury of doing real archaeology, the kind that didn’t involve trying to shoot pictures of artifacts while being chased past them by enemy troops. It was hard to remember how that even felt. He tried to summon up his old enthusiasm for the beginning of a dig, the promise of answers to questions he hadn’t even thought of yet, and couldn’t quite recapture the feeling. All he could think of was how many questions there were, and how inadequate the answers always seemed.
“All right,” John said. “It looks like there’s a river about thirty klicks to the northwest of here, so let’s go check it out.”
Ronon leaned over Rodney’s shoulder to look out the front window. “What are we looking for?”
“Hopefully, visible buildings,” Daniel said. “Or mounds that have accreted over buildings. I’m hoping we won’t end up having to dig too much.”
“It would have been nice if they’d built a road,” John said.
“They probably did, but we’re talking about thousands of years, here. It could be under meters of dirt, and I don’t see anything that looks like the track of a road here. You might try the jumper’s sensors, though. If the road was paved, you may be able to pick up the building material as distinct from the soil in the local area—”
“Already on it,” Rodney said, his hands flying over the console in front of him. “And voilà.” The jumper’s screen now displayed an enhanced version of the scene outside, clearly showing a three-meter strip of irregular paving stone stretching from the gate to the northwest.
“Nice,” Daniel said.
John nodded, one hand moving affectionately over the jumper’s controls. “You ought to get yourselves one of these.”
“You know, we’ve asked, but that keeps not happening.”
“Oh, please, you have a time traveling jumper to study,” Rodney said. “You know we’ve asked for that back, right?”
“It’s like they think we would use it,” John said.
“Only as, you know, a last resort,” Rodney said. Teyla and Ronon exchanged a skeptical look.
“That’s always how it starts,” Daniel said. He squinted at the haze of trees now visible to the northwest, and then at the display scrolling across the screen. “It doesn’t look like the road goes all the way to the river. Take us a little lower.”
John obliged, bringing the jumper down to skim low enough over the grass that it billowed in the wind they kicked up.
“There,” he said, pointing to a stand of scrub trees and bushes far short of the meandering green line of the river’s course on the horizon.
“That’s not near the river,” Rodney said.
“It used to be. Look at the contours, there’s a depression here just the right shape to be an old ox-bow. The river meanders, a loop gets cut off, it turns into a lake, then eventually the lake dries up. What was an outpost next to the river turns into an outpost sitting in the middle of a field. But those trees suggest there’s still some source of water there, try running a more tightly focused scan.”
The display on the console shifted as John gave instructions to the jumper, and Rodney’s skeptical look changed to one of focused attention. “Oh, that’s definitely man made,” he said. “There’s some kind of rectangular structure down there. And metal piping running down to the water table.”
“The Ancients sunk a well. It’s probably leaking, and the water source and the slight windbreak caused by the depression in the ground is how you get trees.”
John frowned as he brought the jumper lower. “Why would the Ancients put in a well if this used to be right on the river?”
“Ah… I’m not entirely sure. Maybe the river water wasn’t drinkable without purification, which makes sense if there was a lot of native wildlife. Or maybe they didn’t want their water source to be dependent on the river’s present course.”
“Taking the really long view?”
“They did that. We’re talking about people who seeded entire civilizations. The chance of the river changing its course in a few hundred years might have seemed like next week’s problem to them. Try not to put us down right on top of the archaeological site, please.”
John set the jumper down well clear of the structure, and Daniel climbed out, pushing his way into the chest-high grass that crunched dryly underfoot as he walked. Teyla fingered a stalk, frowning.
“Problems?” John said, looking sideways at her.
“We call this tindergrass,” she said. “It grows in burned-over fields and other places where there has recently been a fire.”
“I wouldn’t say recently,” John said, pushing dry seed-heads aside as he plowed through the tall grass.
“It grows very quickly. And it burns very easily itself.”
“So would soaking wet wood, in this atmosphere,” Rodney said. “That’s why we’re all going to be really careful—”
“We get the picture,” John said.
Ronon turned abruptly, drawing his pistol, and Rodney slapped his arm. “What did I just say!”
“I thought I saw something.”
“Probably some kind of animal,” John said.
“I figured that, yes.” Ronon pushed his way some distance through the tall grass away from their path, and crouched to brush the grasses aside. “There’s a trail here.”
“Now we get the tyrannosaurs,” Rodney said.
Ronon grinned. “Only if they’re two feet tall.”
“There were small dinosaurs,” Rodney said. “Small but vicious. Probably poisonous.”