STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (9 page)

In which case, Daniel reasoned, letting a mug of coffee steam his glasses while the database threw up an endless ribbon of negative results, why couldn’t he let this go?

Part of the answer was, of course, if not staring him in the face, then at least torturing his eardrums. It was the effect of having Ra’s voice played back at him through that accursed, smoke-stinking tape deck.

After all, his wife had only been dead a year, and her loss still impaled him.

Ra had been the chief among the System Lords, in as much as that squabbling, fragmented, murderous clan of tyrants could ever have a leader. No human could have known it at the time, but Ra’s influence over the other Goa’uld was keeping them partly in check. Apophis, his despotic son, had only come to power once Ra had died.

But whatever Ra’s last moments had entailed, it was arguable that his absence caused more woe and destruction than his existence. His demolition had almost certainly led directly to the abduction and appropriation of Sha’re. So if responsibility were the issue, or fault, or blame… Who but Daniel Jackson could truly bear it?

How many people would still be alive if he hadn’t travelled to Abydos?

He was tired, that was the problem. His mind had a tendency to wander forbidden paths when he was fatigued. All he needed to do was rest, to gather his thoughts and find his centre once again, and then he could make the loss and the pain and the regret go away, at least for a while.

He set the coffee on his desk and got up. “I’m going to head back to my quarters for a while.”

“I shall alert you once the search is complete,” Teal’c told him.

“Thanks.” He took his glasses off to rub his eyes on his way out, and as a result almost collided with Sam Carter as she barreled through the door. “Hey!”

“Sorry,” she puffed. “Didn’t you hear the phone?”

“No, why?”

“Damn.” She walked quickly past him, picked up the internal line and listened closely to the handset. “Still dead.”

“Were you trying to call us?”

“For the past ten minutes.” She put the handset down and raised a crumpled sheet of printout. “Something just red-flagged down in operations.”

There was a look on her face that Daniel didn’t like at all. Something had unnerved her. “Sam, is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure. Look, have you heard of a Professor Laura Miles? She’s an Egyptologist, retired about four years ago.”

“Miles? Yeah, I know her. We worked together on a couple of digs, before…” He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious. Flashbacks to certain seminars, he guessed. “We had a sort of falling-out. Some of my theories weren’t to her taste.”

“Daniel, I’m sorry — she was admitted to a hospital in Cairo about ten minutes ago.”

Even before the disagreements, Daniel could never have counted Miles as a friend. But he respected the woman’s work, and he hated to think of her in pain. “That’s a damn shame. What happened?”

“The report said that there was some kind of fire or explosion at a dig site she was working on.”

“So she was working again…” Something Sam had told him a few moments earlier suddenly connected in his head. “Hold on, why do we know about this?”

“Like I said, it red-flagged. According to the Egyptian police report, whatever happened to Miles happened between one-thirty and two PM local time. Given the time difference between here and there…”

He grimaced. “Three thirty-seven. Ra’s message.”

There was an encrypted fax receiver on the transport plane. Six hours into the journey it began to chirrup and spit out pages. Daniel, who had been holding very tightly onto his seat with his eyes closed for most of the flight so far, looked up to see Jack bringing a sheaf of paper back along the gangway. “I tell you,” he said, voice raised over the noise of the engines. “These in-flight magazines are getting thinner.”

“Cutbacks,” replied Daniel, rather wanly.

Jack handed him the pages. “You okay?”

“Been better. I kind of like facing front on long flights, you know?”

He had certainly been on more comfortable journeys. The plane was old, a slightly battered C-130 Hercules kitted out almost entirely for cargo, and it was flying through air that felt, at least to Daniel, as if it were made of gravel. Most of the plane’s internal space was filled with piles of crates and equipment cases, leaving just a few meters up by the cockpit for a seating area. Two benches had been fixed there, one on either side of the fuselage, leaving SG-1 sitting in facing pairs. It was a far from ideal arrangement, simply the quickest way of getting them into the air, and although Daniel had been forced onto flights like this before he loathed them with a queasy passion.

If the seating arrangements and the lurching of the plane under him wasn’t bad enough, he wasn’t entirely certain that the stacked crates were as secure as they could be. He was getting visions of them breaking free during one of the flight’s many turbulent bounces and sliding back along the fuselage to scissor his legs off at the knees.

The unbidden thought made his stomach jolt a little, so he focused his attention on the fax pages. “Oh,” he mumbled, after reading a few lines.

“Oh?”

“Looks like the Air Force subpoenaed PLH.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “Who?”

“Parker Lexington Holdings. They’re the company Laura Miles was working for — they financed the dig she was at.” He read further down the page. “Hold on… Oh, you have got to be kidding me…”

“What?”

“PLH are in big trouble. Looks like they illegally hacked a satellite feed.”

Sam’s eyes went wide. “Sorry? A holdings company hacked a satellite?”

“From what I’ve got here, it seems they’re into a lot more than just property… You know, I was wondering why there was a dig going on in the middle of summer.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Have you ever been to Egypt in summer?” He saw her shake her head slightly. “Well, it’s way too hot in Egypt at this time of year to do any real work — most digs take place in winter, spring at the latest. But it looks like these PLH people have been trying to go under the radar. It says here they hacked a feed from the TIAMAT satellite.”

“That’s a UN bird,” Jack cut in. “Ground mapping, right? Pollution, erosion, underground water, that kind of stuff…”

“Yeah,” agreed Daniel, rather surprised. “Thermal Imaging, Atmospherics, Mapping and Terrain. Why do you know that?”

“Because the United States Air Force paid for about half the instruments on it. We get a direct feed.”

“And PLH hacked it?” Sam gave a low whistle. “Talk about being really smart and really dumb at the same time.”

“They can’t have known who they were actually stealing from.”

“So what did they find?”

“An anomaly, that’s all it says here — evidence of something under the ground, I’d guess. They didn’t want to go through the usual channels because they didn’t want anyone to know how they’d found it. Seems they assembled a team on the quiet and shipped them out two weeks ago.” He flipped the page, onto the first of series of brief personnel files. “They had a fixer, Lucas Harlowe. Hmm.”

“Daniel, you know how nervous I get when you say
Hmm
.”

“Huh? Oh, right. It’s just that he’s had a pretty interesting career, that’s all. Afghanistan, Mozambique, Somalia… I wonder if Laura knew she was working with a mercenary?”

“Anything else?”

The plane slid sickeningly to one side. Daniel swallowed hard, then fixed his attention on the next sheet. A young woman stared out of the grainy photograph at its top left. “Anna Andersson. Twenty-nine, archaeology graduate from Stockholm. Don’t know her…” On the sheet under that, a bespectacled man with short blonde hair, dressed in black. “Greg Kemp, geophysicist from Glasgow University. Not my field, really. Hey, they got Mohammed Rashwan, I worked with him on the Saqqara dig in ’92.”

“He got Laura Miles to hospital,” said Sam. “The police report didn’t mention the others, though.”

“Is there a search out for them? They might know what happened.”

Sam shrugged. “No mention of them in the police report.”

“So,” said Jack. “What do we think — they triggered that heads-up from Ra?”

“It’s a theory. Some of the message could be taken to mention something buried — a pit, or a deep hole, sacred seals…”

“And the massive strength of the signal could be simply due to the source being so close,” Sam agreed. “It makes sense to me, sir.”

“Sense?” Jack gave them a slow shake of his head. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Still, we’ve got to at least check it out,” Daniel said, trying to keep his voice steady as the plane lurched again. “If they uncovered a Goa’uld artifact…”

“I know, I know…” Jack tipped his cap down over his eyes and settled back. “Tell you what, Daniel. You keep reading and I’m gonna go to sleep. Wake me when we get there or when this really
does
start to make sense, whichever’s the sooner. Okay?”

“Sure,” Daniel muttered absently, already turning the page.

He wondered if he should pace himself, save some of the fax for later. After all, the flight to Cairo West airbase was going to take another twelve hours at least, and the chances of him imitating Jack and being able to sleep through any of it were slim in the extreme.

As the notion occurred to him, the plane tilted vehemently to port, the sound of its engines rising to a tortured howl before settling again. Daniel clenched his jaw tight for a moment as his stomach flipped, and put away all thoughts of stretching his reading tasks any further. The sooner he could go back to holding onto the aircraft and keeping his eyes shut the better.

The plane touched down at three in the afternoon, on tarmac that was already gluey with heat.

The airbase was vast, and impossibly flat. Daniel’s first view of it was from the C-130’s hatchway, only a couple of meters from the ground, and there still didn’t seem to be a piece of it he couldn’t see. It just stretched away forever, runways and access roads blurring into flat desert, blacks and grays fading out to an eternal, uniform beige that didn’t stop until it met the sky.

Apart from a few boxlike buildings and some sporadic clusters of shade trees, all that rose above that unending level were the aircraft ranked up in lines to either side of him. It was a depressing sight, lifeless and beaten and rippling under the baleful summer sun.

After his less than edifying time on the aircraft, Daniel wondered how long he would now have to stay in this barren place. He need not have worried, because General Hammond had already contacted the base commander.

The workings of the US military still had the power to puzzle and surprise Daniel Jackson, even after so long under its wing. In an edifice as vast and complex as the USAF, he had long ago decided, inertia was a default state — even though the personnel might seem to be in a constant hurry, the organization itself did nothing at any pace other than glacial. In fact, Daniel could think of no better analogy; a billion tons of frozen military bureaucracy, grinding its slow, inexorable way across the boulder-fields of budget and meeting, committee and oversight.

That is, until a man with a certain type of badge on his collar picked up a telephone, and instantly the glacier became an avalanche.

As soon as Daniel’s boots hit the tarmac, events accelerated to a hazy speed. A humvee arrived to pick the team up and transport them to one of the outlying office buildings, and soon after that to the offices of the airbase commander. With very little preamble they were given new equipment, civilian clothing and information packs, and then shipped out to a third building where they had just a few minutes to change into their new outfits and read their orders.

It was no shock to Daniel that he and the others were under instructions to remain in civilian clothing during their investigation. What did surprise him a little was finding out that he was now Laura Miles’ nephew.

“It feels weird,” he told Sam an hour after landing, as they drove to the hospital. “I don’t like the idea of this at all.”

“I understand that,” she replied. “And I’m sorry. But you have to speak to her. We just don’t have time to let hospital policy get in the way.”

“What if we’re wrong?”

“About the artifact?” She shrugged. “Then you’re visiting a friend in hospital. There are worse things to be doing.”

They were alone in the car. Jack and Teal’c had stayed at the airbase, to confirm the location of the dig site via another pass of the TIAMAT satellite, and to arrange transportation out to the desert.

He drove in silence for a while. The airbase had provided them a with a white Toyota pickup that looked in much worse shape than it actually was. Its aircon was functional rather than luxurious, though, and while Daniel was able to keep to the main roads and drive at a decent speed, he and Sam had both opted to simply keep the windows open.

Daniel had driven in Cairo before, many times, and he knew the best routes. It seemed that Sam was content to let him take over this part of the operation. For once, he realized with no small sense of satisfaction,
he
was the expert.

“How far now?” Sam asked, after a few more kilometers had rolled under the Toyota’s wheels. Daniel slowed for an intersection, swerved the vehicle wildly between a Volkswagen Beetle and a camel cart, and swung left onto Youssif Abas.

“Not too far.” Stark white tenements were scrolling past to his right, blindingly reflective in the harsh sunlight. To his left, the stadium reared like an alien monument. “They took her to one of the smaller hospitals in the west of the city first, but she was moved to the Cleopatra last night.”

Sam glanced around at him, pale eyebrows rising above the dark lenses of her shades. “The Cleopatra hospital? Really?”

“Really.”

“I thought that was just a placeholder on the orders.”

“No, it’s actually called that.”

He went right again, onto Salah Salem, a main thoroughfare that would take him almost all the way to Heliopolis and the hospital. The traffic was still fairly light, due in part to the heat. Few would choose to be driving on a day that could turn vehicles to ovens. Still, even light traffic in Cairo was a test of both courage and concentration. Daniel saw the sprawl of taillights ahead of him, settled a little more comfortably in his seat, and took a deep breath.