STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (2 page)

Earlier that summer, the process had focused its might on a rock formation some twenty kilometers south of the Giza plateau. The formation was strange, but not notably so — it was a low inland cliff, crescent-shaped, its concave, north-facing side curled over as though a perfect surfer’s wave had swept in from some unimaginable sea, reared up and then frozen hard into a wall of pitted yellow stone. For thousands of years the crescent had been filled with sand and largely hidden, but the complex vagaries of wind and weather had, over the previous century or two, conspired to scoop it clean.

The movement of dunes is impossible to model precisely. In another century the crescent might well have filled again, but it never got the chance. It was too exposed to survive. Robbed of its supporting mass of sand, it fell prey to the remorseless battering of daytime heat and night-time cold: together they beat at that perfect wave until, one night in early June it cracked, and split, and tumbled into a thousand pieces to litter the desert with its ruins.

No-one saw it happen. But hours later, high above the clear Egyptian air, eyes that owed nothing to evolution noted the change in terrain. Had the machine that owned them been on its normal flight path the collapse might well have gone unremarked, but there had been a minor, yet unexplainable malfunction in its navigational systems earlier that day. So it saw the collapsed area of rock, then looked more closely, and detected something from which a certain select group of human beings might be able to profit.

Which is how, four weeks later, Professor Laura Miles found herself standing at Cairo airport with a small information pack, a non-disclosure agreement from Parker-Lexington Holdings and the fattest bank balance she’d seen since she retired.

It took another two hours to reach the dig site. The terrain made for slow going, the SUV’s big tires slipping and skittering as sand gave way to broken stone, stone to gravel, gravel to scrub and back to sand again, sometimes within the space of a few meters. After ten continuous days of travelling to the site at dawn and back to Cairo again at dusk, Miles thought that she really should have been getting used to the jolting.

She wasn’t. Every time she got out of the SUV her left hip felt like a fire had been lit within the bone.

The sun was well above the horizon by the time they got to the dig. A sharp dip in the terrain brought the site into view; a long, shallow crescent stretching away towards the Nile. The northern face of the curve faded out, merged back into level desert in the space of half a kilometer, but the southern edge was a jagged line of hard shadow.

As the SUV rolled closer, Miles found herself picking out details of the excavation itself, trying to see what had changed since the day before. The ragged trail of flat-roofed tents had extended overnight — there were six of them now, plus the flapping ribbon of camouflage fabric that hugged the shadowed edge of the crescent and concealed the main find. Someone had parked a flatbed truck over by the spoil heaps, and Miles saw figures clustered behind it. With luck, they would be unloading the extra
sibas
she had asked for.

Otherwise, the place was much as it had been; a random scatter of shadows cast onto a curve of bright, hot sand, dotted with robed figures. Not much to look at, considering how much it had occupied her body and mind for the past ten days.

The SUV slowed at the edge of the crescent, then tipped down into it. There was a slightly hairy moment when one of the tires hit a patch of sand that was little more than powder, and spent a second or two flinging it up in a great yellow roostertail while the other wheels juddered against the dune, but in a second or two the crisis had passed and the vehicle was rolling down into shadow. Kemp pulled around left, under one of the big camouflage tents, and killed the engine. The SUV shuddered and became still.

Kemp let out a long breath. “Everyone okay?”

Andersson didn’t speak, just hauled open the door on her side and jumped down onto the sand, slamming the door behind her. Miles watched her stalking away, long angry strides that carried her fast across the site, her pale skin already blotchy in the heat.

“Anna!” Kemp was out too, standing next to his open door and shouting across the vehicle’s roof. “Wait!”

“Let her go,” Miles told him. “It’s not you she’s mad at.”

Kemp made a helpless gesture in Andersson’s direction, then slapped the roof angrily. Dust rose to settle on his black shirt. “Ballsed that up, didn’t I?”

“I told you, it’s not your fault.” Miles opened her own door and got out, putting her weight on her right foot until she had retrieved her cane from the seat. “She’s been trying to call her husband for the past four nights, but Harlowe’s done something to the phones.”

His eyebrows went up. “Really?”

“Him or someone from PLH.”

“Bloody hell.”

“What, you’ve not tried to call Sarah?”

“Ahh…” Kemp looked embarrassed. He hadn’t, Miles realized, with some amusement. Harlowe had told him not to, so he hadn’t.

In truth, she couldn’t blame either of them. Harlowe was only following the instructions from his superiors, and Kemp didn’t want to risk the other half of his money. Geophysics wasn’t a field that was going to make anyone rich, even with the reputation he had built for himself since leaving Glasgow. With a new wife and a baby on the way, there was no way he could pass up what Harlowe was offering.

There was nothing between Kemp and Andersson of course: not romantically, anyway. Maybe a slight crush on Kemp’s part, at worst. But it was natural for friendships to blossom in circumstances like these, and it made the work easier if people got along.

“I’ll talk to her,” Miles said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Somebody does. Better me than Harlowe.” Miles had noticed the company man’s jeep parked under the new tent. Sooner or later she would have to go and give him a status report, but she still felt unsettled from the morning’s sights. Better to spend a few minutes trying to mollify Andersson, before she attempted to deal with Harlowe’s demands.

“Look, just get the geophysics rig sorted out, okay? Once we get that roof slab out of the way we’ll need another sweep.”

“Fine,” he replied. “Hey, give me a yell if there’s any coffee on the go, okay?”

Miles gave him a tired wave of assent, then turned and began to make her way across the site, leaning heavily on the cane. She still didn’t feel right. There was an oddness here she couldn’t identify, a strange sense that the ground she walked on wasn’t entirely solid. The scene around her looked unstable, as if painted on flimsy backdrops. Everything seemed unreal — even the Egyptian workers, walking past her with their wheelbarrows and shovels and measuring lines, were ghosts, kin to the dead man by the highway.

Their robes hung low. She couldn’t see their feet, couldn’t judge where they ended and the desert began.

In the distance, voices rose. Miles cupped a hand over her eyes, looking back towards the curving stone wall. One of the new
sibas
had already been raised, and a knot of men was hauling the second into position. The
sibas
were lifting devices, three-meter tripods of stout wood, fitted with winches. One could lift half a ton of stone, but when she and Andersson had finished uncovering the roof slab they had realized just how massive it was. Two
sibas
would never have been enough to move it.

“Professor?”

The voice startled her. Lucas Harlowe had been standing next to her while she was watching the Egyptians.

Damn
, she thought sourly. “Lucas! It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

“So when did you get in?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Flew in last night. And yeah, everything’s fine.” Harlowe was American, but Miles couldn’t quite place his accent. “Mohammed was just saying you’d cleared a new layer.”

There were at least four Mohammeds working at the site, but Miles knew Harlowe was talking about Mohammed Rashwan, the Conservation Director. “That’s right.”

“Find anything?”

He wasn’t going to wait, she could tell from his voice. She would have to postpone her peacekeeping duties for a while.

“Follow me,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

Over by the spoil heaps, one of the tents had been set up to shade a long wooden bench-table and several folding chairs. It was here that the most painstaking work on the site should have been done — the cleaning and cataloguing of small finds, the translation of hieroglyphs, the careful detailing and mapping of every artifact found in the excavations. On all of Miles’ previous digs, the table tended to be a major focus of interest, but after a few days of finding nothing in the sand but random fragments of uniformly dull pottery its original purpose had become almost forgotten. Now it was just a convenient place to sit.

There was one item on the table that was still used. At one end, a poster-sized sheet of printout had been carefully taped down to the wood, sealed on all four sides so the wind couldn’t lift it and bear it away. Miles picked up one of the folding chairs, shoved it hard down into the sand next to the map and sank down into it, stretching out her left leg and leaning the cane against the table. Harlowe took up position next to her, peering down at the printout and the sprawl of hand-drawn details and notations that covered it. “So what am I looking at here?”

The answer to that, Miles knew, was rather more complex than she could easily explain.

The printout was a topographical map of the site, showing the long curve of the wall and its complex patterns of elevation and ground composition. It was clearly generated from satellite data, but any hint of where that data had come from had been carefully excised.

At the very centre of the map, surrounded by Rashwan’s impossibly precise notes, lay a small area hatched in blue. Miles found herself staring at it, at the tiny shaded shape that had drawn her back to Egypt in midsummer, had led Kemp and Andersson and Rashwan out to this nameless patch of desert and kept them here while the sun beat down and the secrets mounted up. A rectangle of blue ink that no-one would have known existed had it not been for the satellite and its thermal eyes.

The shape was not a measure of topography. It was a temperature reading. Something bounded by that hatched area was ten degrees cooler than the surrounding desert, and no-one could work out why.

“Okay,” she forced her attention back to Harlowe. “How much had we done last time you were here?”

That would have been five days ago. “You’d gone down a meter,” Harlowe replied. “Found a lot of broken columns, some pottery…”

“Right. Well, the supply of columns dried up pretty fast. We found twenty, all damaged.” She picked up a nearby pen and used the end of it to indicate a double row of circles on the map, surrounding the shaded patch. “We think they bordered a short processional, like a pathway with columns either side.”

“Leading to what?”

Miles shrugged. “I don’t know. We were expecting to find evidence of a roof, but so far all we’ve got is one slab.” She traced a rectangle between four of the circles, each corner at the centre of one column. “There should be another eight, but either they’re a long way off the main dig or they’re gone completely.”

“Nothing in any of the other trenches.”

“No. The one we’ve found is good quality stone; solid, well-carved. A lot of what was here might well have been stolen, hauled off to build other projects.”

Harlowe made a face. “God dammit,” he muttered. “You know what I think we’ve got?”

“What?”

“A well.” He picked up one of the finds from near the map, a totally unremarkable shard of pottery. “Maybe ceremonial, healing waters or something… There’s a chunk of water table under there, and the local bigwigs put a roof over it.” He waved the shard. “Probably charged for jugs of the stuff.”

Miles had heard crazier theories than that, and from people with a lot more archaeological knowledge than Harlowe. Some of the stuff poor Daniel Jackson used to come up with… Underground water could have explained the site’s temperature, if it was contained in a small area rather than leaching out into the surrounding desert.

If it
was
water, Miles thought, Harlowe wouldn’t have been entirely displeased. When PLH had started funding this dig they had been banking on the temperature anomaly signaling either a buried structure of much denser material than the surrounding matrix, or an as-yet undiscovered segment of water table. Miles had never been able to determine exactly what kind of deals PLH had done with the Egyptian authorities for control of the site, if any, and she guessed that the dig was only being allowed to continue because no-one was fully aware of it yet. Still, if there was water this far into the western desert, no doubt the Egyptian government would look kindly on PLH for discovering it for them. Likewise, if a new tomb complex lurked down here, sucking heat from the ground, that could be made to benefit both parties too.

To Miles, neither explanation seemed very likely, but her job was to dig the site, not fret about PLH and their machinations. That’s what Harlowe was for.

“There’s something else. Those pillars didn’t just fall down. They were knocked down.”

“How can you tell?”

“The fall pattern. And the way that somebody chiseled every name off every section before they flattened the place.”

Harlowe frowned. “Okay, I’m no expert. But didn’t the Egyptians used to do that when someone had really pissed them off?”

“Yes, or if they wanted to take credit for a predecessor’s works. But it looks like malice here, all right.”