STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (11 page)

“
All the more reason to get this done, Major.”

He was right, Carter knew. Day or night, the threat would still be the same — her initial reaction, after Miles had shown such a terror of being left in darkness, was to think of daylight as safer. But the woman had been attacked in the heat of the afternoon, so there probably was no reason to delay.

Besides, out there in the desert, searching for whatever had burned off a woman’s arm and caused corruptions to sprout in her body, she would at least have her comrades at her side and a weapon in her hands.

Right now, that was a comfort she could understand. “Where shall we meet you?”

During their time at the airbase, O’Neill and Teal’c had successfully secured a feed from the TIAMAT satellite, and used its imaging facilities to not only pin down the exact location of the dig site, but also to take some surprisingly detailed photographs of it. Carter and Daniel studied the images while O’Neill drove the four of them into the desert.

The pickup was still in Cairo. The trip to the dig site needed something with more storage and more muscle, and the airbase had provided both in the form of a modified Jeep Wrangler that looked like a civilian vehicle until one noticed just how solidly it was built. The Wrangler was piled high with equipment in sealed cases and bundles, and Daniel, upon seeing it waiting for them, had wondered aloud if O’Neill was overcompensating at all for his lack of winter clothing of Sar’tua. The comment had earned him a sour look from the Colonel, but Carter had been forced to agree that it did look as if they were taking along everything they might possibly need for this trip, and far more besides. Then again, SG-1 usually went out on their missions with no more than they could carry on their backs. Having some machinery to help lighten the load was something of a novelty.

There were reading lamps over the back seats, which enabled Carter and Daniel to compare the images even though night had fallen over the desert.

After they had been driving for about thirty minutes, O’Neill looked over his shoulder. “You kids okay in the back?”

Daniel didn’t lift his head. “Are we there yet, Mom?”

O’Neill returned his attention to the road. “See anything in those pictures?”

“Well,” Carter said, “I think it’s more about what we’re not seeing.”

“Like what?”

“There’s a lot of camouflage netting up, for one thing. I guess PLH didn’t want anyone checking up on them. Some of it looks as if it’s come down, maybe knocked over, but I can’t see anything that looks like the entrance to a pit.”

Daniel pointed at a long ribbon of sand-colored netting. “I’d guess that’s under here. Sam, do you see any people in these shots?”

“I was going to mention that. But it’s summer, you said yourself no-one stays out in the sun for too long. Maybe they’re under the netting.”

“Maybe.” Daniel didn’t sound sure.

“O’Neill,” Teal’c said suddenly. “It is time.”

Carter wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. “Time for what?”

“Time for things to get a little bumpy,” O’Neill muttered, and swung the wheel over.

After that, looking at the satellite images wasn’t really an option. Carter had seen all she needed to see of the site anyway, so was happy enough to drop the photographs and switch off the reading light. She needed both hands to hang onto the seat and the grab-strap, anyway.

There had been something on one of the photos that stayed in her mind, however, although she chose not to mention it. The resolution of the satellite imagery wasn’t quite high enough for her to be sure, and anyway, it might not mean anything at all. So she held her tongue, as the vehicle lurched and bounded its way across the dunes.

Once they were at the site, she could find out for certain if she really had seen a single, abandoned wheelbarrow, tipped over and left unheeded between two camouflage tents, as if someone had flung it aside in their mad scramble to escape.

O’Neill parked the Wrangler a kilometer west of the PLH site. SG-1 crossed most of the remaining distance on foot, splitting into two teams when they were within a hundred meters or so. Carter and Teal’c headed south, while O’Neill came in from due west with Daniel.

It was truly night, now, and the sky was a lake of stars. The temperature had begun to drop sharply at sunset, and Carter judged it to be dipping close to freezing as she picked her way towards the site. The civilian clothing they had been issued included heavy jackets, and Carter was glad of hers. The cotton shirt she had been wearing during the day would have done nothing to stop the chilly wind cutting right through her.

The conditions were really nothing like Sar’tua’s bitter climate, but just close enough to throw up some unpleasant memories.

It felt odd to be wearing civilian clothing and carrying a weapon, and stranger still to be looking at the world through night-vision goggles as she walked. Carter had always found the devices to be fascinating, but wearing them was a surreal experience. She trudged through a world made entirely of green, under a soupy, verdigris sky, seething with the random sparks of stray photons, while the sand beneath her boots was a livid emerald. Teal’c, stalking ahead of her and to her right, was an animated statue of dark jade, the leather jacket he was wearing so dark in the goggle’s view that it was almost part of the night itself.

There was no sound, save that of a gentle desert breeze shifting sand from the tops of dunes, and her own breathing as she walked.

Abruptly, Teal’c stopped and raised a hand. Carter moved up next to him and pressed a key on her radio handset twice, letting O’Neill know they were in position. Then she dropped to one knee, looking down over the dig site.

The place seemed very different from the clear, daylight images TIAMAT had provided them, but its layout was familiar to her now. The rocky overhang was under her feet, curving away to either side for hundreds of meters before fading back into level sand, and ahead were the pitiful collection of fabric tents and battered furniture that had made up the dig itself. Carter spent a few seconds scanning the site carefully for any signs of movement, but saw nothing but green-lit stillness.

“Looks clear,” she said quietly. “Teal’c, do you see anything?”

“I do not. There are signs of damage, but none of life.”

She keyed the radio. “Colonel O’Neill, this is Carter. We’re overlooking the site now.”

“Same here. I think we missed the party.”

Carter wondered if he would have used that word had he seen what had become of Laura Miles, but she kept her silence on the matter. “Shall we move in?”

“Affirm —”
he began, then stopped.
“Hold on. What?”
The final word was fainter, and Carter realized it was not aimed at her. O’Neill must have been talking to Daniel.

A moment later his voice returned. He sounded a little uncomfortable.
“Ah, Major? Daniel’s just raised an interesting point.”

“Which is?”

“Whether we’d considered the possibility of disease.”

Carter frowned. She had been working under the assumption that the damage to Miles’ body had been the result of some trauma; a chemical or radiation burn, explosion or crush injury. But could a pathogen have torn into her so vilely? The secondary tissue damage, those internal pockets of decay seeding her muscles and lymph nodes, certainly spoke of disease.

Maybe Miles had seen the work of some alien plague working its way up her arm, and had self-amputated to stop the spread of it.

Or perhaps Mohammed Rashwan had done it for her.

Remembering the Conservation Director put the theory out of Carter’s mind very quickly. “Sir, I don’t think that’s likely. Rashwan took Miles all the way back to Cairo, and there must have been a couple of dozen other workers here too. There’s no report that Rashwan was ill, and no scare stories about plagues in Cairo.”

“Rashwan’s not been found yet, though.”

“PLH probably had him under wraps. I’m sure he’ll surface once the company folds up.”

There was a pause. Then:
“I think you’re
right.”

“Tell Daniel that he was smart to bring it up, though. He had me going for a minute there.”

“You and me both. Okay, you and Teal’c go in and conduct a ground search. We’ll get the Wrangler and bring the gear up.”

“Understood. Carter out.” She got up. “Come on,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Let’s find a way down.”

Teal’c gestured to the east side of the site. “I believe there is a scree slope in this direction, Major Carter.”

She peered out into the green darkness, but saw nothing. “You saw that from the photos?”

“I did not.”

“Okay…” Was he even wearing the goggles? She checked, and noticed that he was. How low he needed the gain set was anyone’s guess, though. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“I believe it is ‘
Lay
on’, Major Carter.”

The Jaffa began striding down a jumble of broken rock and shifting sand, part of the curving rock wall that had shattered away to reveal the TIAMAT anomaly months earlier. Carter, slightly less sure of her footing, eased her way down behind him. “Give me a break, Teal’c. Everyone gets that line wrong.”

“That is what led me to remember it.”

He stepped off a jagged slope of sandstone, instantly dropping into a combat stance, staff weapon held at the ready. Carter watched his great head swinging slowly left and right, scanning for threats, and for a moment needed no reminding that he had been born a very long way away indeed.

She jumped down to ground level, bringing her MP5 up to cover Teal’c’s blind side. Her failure to spot any movement at the site was no indication that they could relax. Until she was completely sure she and Teal’c were alone here, she would stay combat-ready. To do otherwise was to invite the same fate as Laura Miles, and Carter had every intention of avoiding that.

They began to move slowly through the site, one scampering forwards a few meters while the other covered, then switching positions, gradually eliminating every possible place an enemy might hide. They found no threats, but everywhere there was evidence of a panicked and hasty retreat — upturned tables, dropped tools, discarded notebooks. Carter almost tripped over the abandoned wheelbarrow, now half-covered in the shifting sand, and seeing it gave her an ugly thrill of recognition.

Much of the debris was scattered around the edges of a deep pit near the overhang. Carter went back to it after the sweep was completed, and peered down into its shadows.

A slab of pure darkness leered at its centre, surrounded by discarded tools. “They left in a hurry, all right.”

“And have not returned,” Teal’c replied quietly.

Carter hadn’t thought of that. Thirty hours had passed since Miles had been attacked, if her injuries had occurred at the same time that Ra’s message came through the Stargate. Wouldn’t somebody have come back to the dig site to investigate before now?

The thought was, if anything, more troubling than that of the dig’s initial, hurried evacuation. It didn’t take much to make the average person flee for his life, not in Carter’s experience. But to make him run and keep on running, to not return at all…

There was a sound behind her, a distant, rattling growl. She spun around, bringing the MP5 up against her shoulder, and a few seconds later saw the Wrangler’s angular prow emerge over the far dunes. It was a welcome sight, but she kept her weapon aimed until she could clearly see O’Neill’s face through the windshield. Theirs could not be the only Jeep in Egypt.

“All clear, sir,” she reported as he turned off the engine and got out. “You were right about missing the action.”

“Great.” He hauled the goggles of his face, took a moment to rub the bridge of his nose vigorously, then reached back into the Wrangler’s tangled stacks of gear. “Damn things never fit me right,” he muttered.

“Sir?”

“Aha!” He pulled out a big, army-issue flashlight and switched it on, scanning the beam around. “Better. Lots better.”

The beam glared like a searchlight in Carter’s goggles. She tugged them from her head, shaking her hair back into some kind of shape once they were off. Without them, the world seemed ferociously clear, its edges sharp and crystalline. She had forgotten how much detail the goggles had to trade in order to turn night to day. “Sir, we found this.”

O’Neill frowned past her, at the pit and its forlorn collection of tools. “Daniel?”

“Right with you.” Daniel was ridding himself of his own goggles, unlocking them carefully to avoid snagging his spectacles. “Oh, I see… Ah, Jack? Can you give me some light down there? No, at the hole, that’s it.”

In the beam of O’Neill’s flash, the dark rectangle Carter had seen earlier suddenly flipped its perspective. Through the goggles, she hadn’t been exactly sure what it was, but now she could see that it was a smooth-sided hole in the sand, lined with what looked like black stone.

“Is that the TIAMAT anomaly?” she asked.

“I think so.” Daniel took a deep breath. “I guess this is where we start unloading the truck.”

The shaft didn’t go down as far as Carter feared it might. After a few meters it terminated in a sheet of dull, golden metal.

Daniel was kneeling next to her, at the edge of the hole. He had been running his hands over the smooth stone of its interior for the past minute or two, as if trying to gain some insight into its origins by touch alone.

“It’s granite,” he said finally. “Incredible workmanship, but it’s human.”

“How old?”