Ice Henge Observation Post

The recent snow storm has blown over, and like a colony of ants the science team has dutifully swarmed in to resume their work at the strange "Ice Henge" situated atop the hill east of camp. The weather seems to have warmed a few degrees, as measured by the slightly longer stay times allowed by medical. To make things easier, a temporary tent outpost has been erected just outside the 'J' monolith, providing a place to go and warm up--and be prodded with questions on the communications link to the command tent down below. It's not much, but it beats a zero-G vacuum any day of the week...

Major Eileen Thorsson

The Major sits quietly by the table in the main tent, sipping a mug of watered-down, but still caffinated enough, coffee as she ponders the monoliths. She hopes that this will work, but she knows how things tend to go in these situations.

Namely, pear-shaped.

The tent flap opens and Klaus comes stomping in, brushing snow from his shoulders and removing the heavy cap that covered his cropped, wavy blond locks. He is about to cross to his usual workstation in the far corner of the tent when he stops short, looking suspiciously at Eileen. "Vell, Frau Major, vat in Gott's name are you doing up here? Finally had enough of your zupercilious XO, or you vant to play zientist for a bit?" He resumes his forward motion, plopping down in one of the chairs and calling up an analysis of the dialing runes. "Must be some correlation here..." he muses to himself, as though his awareness of Eileen's presence has vanished with his renewed focus on the task at hand.

Sarah ducks into the tent and begins speaking as she enters without really looking around. She has seen two sets of fairly recent footprints leading into the tent and assumed that the newly forged "science team" was on premises. "Ok, so what do we have," she asks as she enters the tent and pushes back the hood of her parka, though she doesn't bother to take the outer garment off.

"Oh... Major..." she stammers as she notices Thorsson sitting at the table, totally surprised to see the other woman here. She looks about the tent and sees von Braun working on the computer in the corner, "von Braun asked me to help get some more information out of the henge."

"Welkommen, Frau Doktor," Klaus greets Sarah's arrival without looking up. "Looks as if ze last ten dialed locations are zome zort of loose zeekvence, scanning from ze left side of console to ze right. Ze question is, vat ver ze ancients doing taking panoramic shots vith ze Stargate?" He looks up from his computer and shrugs perceptibly, his thin, pale eyebrows matching the quizzical gesture. "No verd from ze linguists on any new funktions."

Sarah walks over to where the man is staring at the computer and grabs a nearby chair and pulls it up to the desk. She smirks as she looks at the addresses, "Obviously they were looking for something. And by the similarities in these addresses, something quite specific, but something they didn't know the address for. The question is, what?" She gives the physicist a look that suggests that she is merely stating what he left unsaid.

She rubs her face with her hands and sighs, "OK, so I'm going to have to admit this. I can dial a gate, but how it all works was conveniently left out of the briefing they give the medical personnel. I'm afraid I'm thinking of how we deal with phone numbers, so I might be completely off the mark. A 1-3 digit country code, an area code that localizes you to a specific region, then an exchange that localizes you to a part of a town, and finally a specific number of a house. So to me this looks like they are trying to find something in a certain neighborhood."

Sarah closes her eyes and leans back in her chair, her face devoid of emotions. "And the linguists have nothing for us..." she sighs in frustration and remains quiet for few moments before beginning again. "OK, so if the Ancients put these things here to be found once intelligent life was on this planet, they wanted us to follow them." She then chuckles, almost breaking out into a laugh as she sits up in her chair. "This whole thing is a test... to show that we are intelligent life. They have to have left some other clues for us. We just need to find them before we all freeze to death."

Sarah crosses her legs beneath her in her seat and rests her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. This presented an interesting dilemma. They needed to get off this planet and try and find their way back to Earth. She was certain that they should be able to find a habitable planet to serve as a new base of operations to try and figure out how to get the survivors back to Earth.

But the Ancients were luring them down a potentially different path. To follow the path of the Ancients from this planet might lead them further from Earth but onto greater discoveries. She herself had ached to get off world and truly see the scope of the universe. She wondered how many in their scientific community would happily forgo this opportunity. She knew that choosing going back to Earth would be her personal second choice.

To not follow the Ancients path could also be disastrous - what might happen if they had planned to eliminate life that was intelligent enough to figure out some of their technology, but insufficiently intelligent to pass their test.

Sarah's face grows sullen and she mutters, "Not good."

She then turns to address the physicist, "Please tell me that Friedrich is some sort of expert in Alteran history and not just a modern day Indiana Jones."

"Ah, Herr Doktor Schrecklich." Eileen chuckles softly at von Braun's suspicious look. "I assumed I'd put myself in the nerve center of the operation, as it were - I can do little at our other sites, but here at least I can coordinate."

She nods to Captian Morgan with a 'carry on' gesture, sipping her coffee and listening to the ongoing discussion without comment - being smart enough to know when the discussions go over her head at suborbital level.

She finally speaks up after a moment's thought. "You're close, Captain. Of course, I'm used to a traditional nine-chevron Gate, but in that you have six coordinates for spatial location in three dimensions, then the seventh chevron establishes the point-of-orgin, which finalises the dialing program's determination of the destination and the route to be taken. The eighth chevron, when used, establishes a different 'area code' - Ida or Pegasus instead of the Milky Way."

Pausing to sip her coffee again, she frowns, then continues. "The function of the ninth chevron hasn't been determined yet. I know Dr. Rush was up to his elbows in researching it but they had yet to come up with any firm answers last I heard. My money in the SGC pool is 'alternate universe dialing'," she admits, chucklinh a lttle before turning serious again. "Of course, with this Gate that could all be out the window and they might well be using something like your system. After all it's entirely feasible that each Gate could have used its own, randomised code instead of a spatial-location code while the system was being developed."

Sarah's mind flits out of her reverie. "That sort of make sense, I suppose. Though once you determine where you are going in three dimensional space and where you are starting from I don't quite see why you'd need to specify another galaxy, other than possibly making it easier to do whatever calculations are necessary." The woman shrugs. Not knowing the intricacies of the gates, she really wasn't in a position to debate why an eighth glyph would be needed in an address. The gates obviously used it for something in dialing between galaxies.

"So there is the potential for 9 glyph addresses... and we have the potential for eleven.... I suppose I watched a bit too much Sci Fi as a kid," she ponders aloud, "But what about time? This gate sounds like an entirely different model than anything anyone has heard of before - could the Ancients have been trying to mess with time or quantum physics?"

Returning to her previous train of thought she shakes her head. As fascinating as this all was, these thoughts were not comforting. What would they have to be able to do to demonstrate they were "intelligent" life.

"I'd assume it's to allow you to "reuse" addresses from one galaxy to another. We still don't have the slighest clue how many 'Gates there are just in this galaxy, last I checked."

The mention of time being a possibility brings a frown to the Major's face. "I suppose that's possible. Of course a normal 'Gate can connect back on itself, same space coordinates, but different time coordinates, in the event of a solar flare being near the wormhole's path...if you assumed two time coordinates in addition to six spatial, point of origin, 'galaxy code' and 'mystery code'...?"

She looks over to Dr. von Braun, for once actually looking slightly interested in Herr Doktor's opinion of something.