Sam thought the area must be a trap.
She discovered the cargo bay off a corridor three levels above the prison cistern from which she had escaped. An iris in the ceiling marked the location of some transport rings, and the room was filled with neatly-stacked, gold-colored transport containers, incised with inscrutable hieroglyphs and the two-headed snake of Apophis.
There were no guards.
They have to know I’ll be looking for transport rings, she thought. Margaret--the Goa’uld--knows that I can’t fly a death glider. The rings are my only chance.
Why aren’t there Jaffa?
Unless--does Margaret also know that I do not know how to use the rings?
Sam circuited the bay three times, looking between cargo containers and climbing quietly over their tops, before she was fully satisfied that no one else was there.
Then she sat on one of the crates, staring at the ring’s control panel.
I’ve been all over the Stargate mechanisms, she thought, when the Colonel and I were stranded with the second gate, and on Hadante, and the time the DHD locked up and the Colonel got blueprints from the Ancients...but those were all Stargates.
Transport rings? How hard can they be?
She got off the crate. After a few minutes of unproductive fiddling with the control-panel, she searched the room, looking for tools--or something she could use as a tool. The Goa’uld were fond of secret compartments; she found a repair kit behind a hieroglyphic-embossed wall panel.
It took her a short while to figure out how to use the alien gizmos. But the work was surprisingly easy once she did so.
Nice to have the right kit for the job.
She removed an access panel below the control surface, and found that with a little tinkering, she was able to power-up most of the transport-ring circuits. To her surprise, she isolated a scanning function which would tell her the coordinates of potential destinations within range.
She entered the coordinates to the ring-set on the ship’s paltak, just for practice, but stopped short of initiating a transfer. Activating the transport rings on the ship’s bridge would definitely attract some attention.
Or maybe just shake them up?
She grinned. She could do this. They could leave.
But she would have to operate the controls from the panel, out in the open, where she’d be a sitting duck if there were any cross-fire. Though the rings were unguarded now, Sam had no doubt that Jaffa would be posted as soon as there was a destination to which she could escape, even if Margaret did know that Sam wasn’t familiar with the rings.
The first mission, Sam thought, Jack’s revised report--one of the Jaffa’s hand devices was a transport ring control.
She turned her attention to the wrist devices she had acquired during her escape from the cistern.
First she tried each jeweled button alone. Then she tried them in combination. Then she tried them in sequence. Nothing seemed to work.
Maybe they can’t function intra-ship? Or maybe the ship has to be in normal space first?
But the control panel should at least show some acknowledgement of the signal...
Frustrated, she dismantled the hand-unit. She was able to activate its various energy paths--but none of them seemed to communicate with the main control panel.
She was beginning to wonder if the remote device had some kind of access code which had been locked out, when an alarm went off overhead.
Grabbing her weapons, and leaving the dismantled devices behind, she dove behind the nearest cargo container.
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