STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (10 page)

“You might want to hold on to something,” he told Sam. And put his foot down.

There was a golden quality to the observation ward. Daniel had expected it to be brighter, more stark and antiseptic, but there were fabric blinds at the windows that attenuated the sunlight into glowing shafts of amber. The walls were plain, a color he couldn’t even identify, but the filtered light warmed them, and the linoleum floor between the beds was broken into a soft chequer of sun and shadow.

He paused at the threshold, looking in, but oddly unwilling to intrude further. The ward was very quiet. Somewhere a machine bleeped gently, and there was a snuffling, a rustle of clean cotton bedclothes as somebody turned over. Apart from that, and the faint, continual hum of the air conditioning, there was only silence.

Daniel found himself thinking more of a museum than a hospital ward.

“Daniel?” Sam was just behind him. Her voice was hushed, but he could hear the subtle edges of her impatience. He didn’t answer her, just steeled himself and stepped inside, the tennis shoes he had been given at the airbase making no sound on the hard floor.

There was a nurse’s station just inside the door. Daniel announced himself to the woman who sat there, and they spoke in Arabic for a few moments; he explaining who he was — or at least who he was pretending to be — and she warning him that his aunt’s condition was severe, and that two visitors might be enough to impair her recovery. A compromise was quickly reached. Sam would stay and wait for a doctor to explain more about Laura Miles’ injuries and how they were being treated, while Daniel would visit her alone.

Miles was in the bed at the far end of the ward, closest to the intensive care unit. In effect, she was hovering between the two wards, not well enough to have been discharged from the ICU but stable enough to no longer need machines assisting her lungs and heart. That situation, the nurse told Daniel, could change at any time, and he must be prepared for this.

The bed was surrounded by curtains, sealing it off entirely from the rest of the ward. Daniel walked hesitantly over to it, lifted an edge of white fabric.

It took him several seconds to recognize the woman who lay there. When he had last seen Laura Miles she had been in her mid-fifties, slender in a way that spoke of hard physical work in bad conditions, her hair, a peppery mix of jet-black and silver, always dragged back from her angular face and tied thoughtlessly with a rubber band. She was animated, angry, short-tempered, fiercely intelligent, prone to bouts of swearing so florid and inventive that on more than one occasion Daniel had been forced to hunt down a dictionary to find out exactly what she’d called him.

They had never been friends. But when his theories had led to the established archaeological community turning its collective back on him, Laura Miles was one of the people he’d missed most of all.

The bed before him cradled someone very different. This woman wasn’t slender, she was
shrunken
, emaciated, her skin pale parchment over birdlike bones. A small reading lamp had been left on over the pillow and its light turned her face into a patchwork of white skin and black shadow. He couldn’t see her eyes at all, just the deep pits of her sockets, as though he were looking at an x-ray, at the structures and failing mechanics lying just beneath the surface.

Her hair was almost completely white, and the way it was spread over the pillow was all wrong for Miles. Daniel found himself looking around for a rubber band.

There was a chair next to the bed, on her right side. He stepped through the curtains and sat down.

“Laura?” he said, very quietly.

On the other side of the bed a monitor made almost imperceptible sounds, and from outside the curtain came faint voices; Sam and a man that Daniel could only assume was the doctor.

Within the curtains, nothing moved. Miles hardly even seemed to be breathing.

“Laura,” he said again, louder this time. “It’s Daniel Jackson. Can you hear me?”

There was no response. Daniel grimaced. He’d come a long way for nothing if she was going to stay asleep.

He rose a little from the chair, looking across the woman’s body. For the first time he saw that her left arm was gone, severed just above the elbow, and the stump heavily bandaged. There was something odd about the skin of her arm above the bandage, though. Daniel leaned over her, making very sure not to touch any part of her or the bed. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if she suddenly awoke to find him looming over her.

There was a patch of bare skin between the bandage around Mile’s upper arm and the white gown she wore. Daniel had been expecting to see evidence of burning there, or a crush injury — what little he had been able to learn from the police report into her injuries had made him envision some explosion or rockfall. But the skin was smooth, and unblemished apart from a strange mottling, like the spread of dark veins in white marble.

The left side of her face was marked in the same way, ashen and swirled with a sprawl of bluish tracks.

Daniel winced, and slowly sat back down. The voices outside the curtain had stopped. He leaned close to the sleeping woman and touched her arm.

He skin was cold. It was like touching a corpse. He jerked his hand back reflexively, and as he did so the curtains moved behind him.

It was Sam, peeking through. She said nothing, but moved her head to beckon him outside.

He followed her, moving a short distance away from the curtained bed. “Find out anything?”

“Not much.” She had folded her arms tightly around herself, as though cold. “What about you? Has she said anything?”

He shook his head. “She’s asleep. I can try waking her up, but I don’t know how responsive she’ll be.”

“You’ve got to try.”

“I know.” He looked away. “So what did the doctor say?”

“Daniel, I don’t think they know what’s wrong with her.” She glanced back along the ward, to make sure no-one was close, and even though they were alone she kept her voice to a murmur. “He says that her arm was gone when she arrived, and that the wound margins were completely dry and…
Crumbling
. He’s thinking maybe a chemical burn, or maybe even radiation, because it looks like there are a bunch of secondary lesions in the lymph nodes and muscle tissue around the injury. So far she’s being medicated for pain relief and to keep her this side of organ failure, but until they know what happened to her they can’t really do all that much.” She gave a small shrug, restricted by her folded arms. “They just don’t have a diagnosis that fits the facts.”

“That’s no burn,” muttered Daniel. “Whatever she found out there…” He trailed off, his thoughts too chaotic to go further. “I’ll try to talk to her again.”

“Sure. Take your time.”

“Something tells me we don’t have too much of that,” he said softly, then walked back to re-enter Laura Miles’ silent, bed-shaped world.

Nothing had changed since he was last here. He sat down again, willing himself to more positive action, but the idea of shaking this stricken soul back to wakefulness seemed brutal, alien. This might have been the first peace she’d been afforded since her injury. What right did he have to rob her of that?

He was on the verge of turning away when she stirred.

The movement was slight, but it spurred him. He put a hand to her shoulder, squeezed it gently, fearing that if he gripped too hard he would splinter those narrow bones. “Laura, it’s Daniel Jackson. I know you’re in there, come on, help me out here…” He shook her, just once. “Please?”

There was nothing. He sighed, and got to his feet. There was no knowledge to be had here, and no point to his presence. He could no more be a help to this woman than she could to him.

“Sleep well,” he breathed, and turned off the reading lamp.

And Laura Miles shrieked, a deafening scream of pure, raw terror.

“Jesus!” gasped Daniel, stumbling backwards, his heart leaping and jittering behind his sternum. Miles was arching up from the bed, her remaining hand clawed, her jaw wide around that awful scream. Her eyes were round and white in the shadowed sockets of her skull: he could see them flicking desperately left and right, and finally he regained the wits that shock had momentarily stolen from him.

“Oh crap, the
light!
Hold on…”

He fumbled for the switch, snapped the reading lamp back on. Instantly the scream stopped, and Miles sagged back. She was looking right at him.

“What the hell?” Sam hissed, nearby.

He could hear footsteps, running. “Keep them out,” he begged. “Please.”

Miles sucked in a rasping breath. “Daniel?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“God, they got you here too?” Her voice was thready, rapid. “Please tell me they didn’t hire you too!”

“Who?”

“Bastards,” she shuddered, then gave a wracking sob. “Oh God, how many more?”

This wasn’t going as he’d planned, and he knew he only had moments. Sam wouldn’t be able to hold the medics off for long. She wouldn’t want to. “Laura, what happened out there? Did something happen at the dig?”

She shook her head. “No. No no no.”

“Please, what did this to you?”

“Daniel, don’t. Please don’t. You can’t. Don’t let them make you.”

“Laura —”

“I saw them… They… They ate him…”

He gripped her shoulder, hard. “Laura,
what did you see?
”

Her mouth worked for a second, silently. Her eyes were fixed on his, a look more completely afraid than he had ever seen. “
Shadows
…”

The curtain whipped back, metal rings chiming. The nurse was there, a doctor, an orderly. Daniel stumbled up and away from the bed. “She woke up,” he managed.

They ignored him, brushed past him as if he were an irrelevant piece of machinery. All their attention was focused on the patient. He heard words in a soothing tone, and caught the glint of a needle catching the ward’s golden glow. The monitor was chirping fitfully, demanding, as if it had woken too. Sam was speaking to him, tugging at his arm, but her words were dull, without edges, and his brain refused to process them into language.

All he heard with any clarity was the terrified, desperate sobbing of Laura Miles.

After
Carter and Daniel had been ejected from the hospital, they returned to the pickup and waited there for O’Neill’s call. The vehicle was in a corner of the Cleopatra’s car park, shaded by palms, and they were not disturbed, even as the sun set and the sky grew dark above them. Carter was thankful for that. After the terrible sight of the crippled woman screaming and sobbing in the observation ward, she needed some time to calm herself.

In her time at Stargate Command, Samantha Carter had been witness to many strange things; mysteries and terrors and dangers that few could even comprehend. She had seen wonders that she thought might burst the heart in her chest, horrors she feared could rob her of sleep forever. She had known any number of men and women who could not adjust to such sights, and there was no shame in it. In fact, Carter often wondered if there was something abnormal about
her
, that she could step from world to world so easily and still close her eyes when the lights went out.

But something about the fate of Laura Miles filled her with a dread that she could neither ignore nor explain. She had been frightened before, genuinely terrified in some of the more extreme situations she had found herself, but Carter was a soldier, and fear would always be her companion. She could deal with that, move through it, make sure it never robbed her of thought or function when it mattered most.

No, this was a deeper feeling, more subtle, and much harder to pin down. And the elusive nature of it was what Carter found hardest to deal with.

There were elements that hit her on a visceral level, of course. Who could have seen the thrashing stump of the woman’s left arm and not react in such a way? Or be quietly sickened by the doctor’s description of the secondary damage, those internal lesions that he had, before his hasty self-correction, referred to as
corruptions
. Tiny, wet sacs of necrosis; not tumors, but bubbles of rot deep within the tissues… The thought made Carter’s gut rebel.

Perhaps, she reflected, her problem was that she couldn’t imagine what might have caused Laura Miles such ruin. Maybe the simple fact that she was faced with a puzzle she could not solve was putting her so much on edge.

If she was true to herself, she was certain that the reason lay elsewhere. But it would have to do for now, because the satellite phone was ringing.

They had been given the phone at the airbase. Daniel picked it up, and Carter put her head close to the handset so she could hear both sides of the conversation. After a short tone and a series of sharp clicks, she heard Jack O’Neill’s voice.

“Where are you?
” were his first words.

“Heliopolis,” Daniel answered. “Eastern part of the city.”

“
Well, get your asses over to the western part. We’re going hunting.
”

Daniel threw Carter a nervous glance. There was little doubt that he was as shaken by his experience in the ward as she had been, probably more so. “Sir,” she said, “are you sure that’s wise?”

“I
don’t know from wise. I just don’t want to wait around until morning.
”

The sun was almost gone, just a liquid layer of ruddy light coating the edges of the skyline’s more prominent towers. “Colonel, it’s looking increasingly likely that four people went into that dig, and only one came out. Believe me, she’s in a pretty bad way.”