STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Read online

  “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.”

  “So there’s this tiny structure, out in the ass-end of nowhere, and somebody vandalized it and stole most of the stone…” He gave her a grim smile. “Guess they got charged too much for the water.”

  Miles could tell he was joking, but it made an odd kind of sense. She was about to answer when someone called her name.

  Andersson was running towards her, holding a sunhat down onto her head with one hand. She went light and dark like a slow strobe, between the tents and open sand, and Miles found herself envying the younger woman her easy stride. It had been a long time since she’d been able to run.

  “Anna?” she asked, as Andersson halted in front of her. “What’s wrong?”

  For a moment Andersson could only shake her head. Then she got in a couple of good breaths. “We found something,” she gasped, then pointed back towards the pit.

  “There’s something under the slab.”

  Raising the slab high enough to see that what lay beneath hadn’t taken very long at all. Shifting it completely out of the way took a lot more time, and the strength of every worker on the site.

  It was immensely heavy, a flat rectangular block of something that looked like smooth, dark granite, at least two meters across and three long. The previous day, Miles had asked Rashwan to get the thing up as quickly as possible, so that a new geophysics survey could be done of the pit’s bed. In response, Rashwan had assembled the two existing sibas before dawn, and the new pair as soon as they had been unloaded from the flatbed. While Miles and Harlowe had been poring over the map, Rashwan and his men had been dragging at the winch chains, determined to do as much heavy work as they could before the day’s heat became too intense.

  As soon as someone had looked under the slab and reported what was there, however, Rashwan had called an immediate halt.

  Now that the slab had been taken the rest of the way, Miles could see it for herself. They all could. Almost the entire workforce was either in or around the pit.

  Kemp was kneeling close to where the slab had lain. He was peering down into what it had been concealing, aiming a big flashlight into the darkness. “Goes down about ten meters, maybe more.”

  Miles peered over his shoulder, watching the light skating off polished surfaces, picking out corners that converged dizzyingly below her. It was a strange sight, dark and frightening and wrong in a way that she couldn’t quite define. “Can you see the bottom?”

  “I think so. Just about.” He sat back on his heels, a baffled expression on his face. “Laura, just what the hell are we looking at here?”

  “I don’t know. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

  Laura Miles had been excavating in Egypt for thirty years before she had retired. She had assisted on dozens of digs, had been Finds Supervisor on nearly twenty and Field Director on nine before this one. And while she had seen plenty of tombs and structures that could only be accessed by narrow stone tunnels, never in all her days had she seen a shaft like the one concealed beneath the roof slab.

  It was deep, but she had seen deeper. It was narrow, but she had scrambled down tunnels barely wide enough for her narrow shoulders. It was dark, but they always were.

  No, what unnerved Miles was the shaft’s perfection. The dense, polished granite cladding its sides was entirely unblemished. Carving and smoothing the stone with such precision must have been an awesome feat of engineering for a people whose most sophisticated masonry tool was the bronze saw. Fitting the slabs together so that not a single seam had cracked or warped or let in moisture after thousands of years was a task that Miles simply couldn’t comprehend.

  It was said that the burial chamber of the Great Pyramid was lined with granite so expertly carved that a razor blade couldn’t fit between the blocks. But time had made its mark even on that astounding monument. This structure, buried under unstable sand in the middle of nowhere, could have been put together the previous week, for all the wear it showed.

  The shaft was not only disturbing, it was perilous. The opening was over a meter wide, certainly large enough to fall into. And while any unfortunate soul tumbling down that black chute wouldn’t fall straight down, the angle of the shaft was steep enough to not only ensure injury, but also to utterly prevent escape.

  The thought made her step back. As she did so, Harlowe pushed his way past some of the workers to join her. A moment later the men parted behind him, and Mohammed Rashwan followed him up to the shaft.

  “Damn,” Harlowe muttered, staring down into the darkness. “That’s no well.”

  Miles nodded slowly. “It’s cold, but there’s no sound of water. The sides are dry, too. No moisture damage.”

  Rashwan peered into the shaft for a few se
conds, and then stepped back. “We will need ladders.”

  “The longest we’ve got are three meters,” Miles replied. “Can we bolt four of them together?”

  He nodded. “I will instruct the carpenters. We will support the joints with slats, use the long nails and tie with rope.”

  “How long?”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  Harlowe looked uncomfortable. “You’re sure? I mean, a ladder made out of bits and pieces… Will it hold?”

  Miles gnawed her lip. “It had better.”

  “I will anchor the top of the ladder here.” Rashwan pointed at one side of the opening. “So it will not slide at the base. Lying against the slope will give it greater strength.”

  “Jeez.” Harlowe crouched, taking the flashlight from Kemp and aiming it down into the shadows. “Maybe we should wait until we can get some specialized equipment in.”

  Miles and Rashwan exchanged a look. “Not a good idea,” the Egyptian smiled.

  “No?”

  “No. Anna saw the truck leave just after this opening was exposed. She says that several of my men were on it.”

  Harlowe made an exasperated sound. “So what?”

  “So,” said Kemp, getting up, “I reckon they’ll be back in Cairo within a couple of hours. Maybe three. Which gives us…” He paused, pulling back one sleeve to check his watch. “Oh, about six hours before you’ve got a hundred people on this site, all wanting a piece of whatever’s down there.”

  Rashwan’s extended ladder looked terrifying, but it got Kemp to the base of the shaft without incident. Andersson had wanted to be first, and Miles had been sure that Kemp would let her, if only to get back in her good books. But apparently the young Scot’s concern for her went deeper than Miles had expected, and he’d brooked no argument.

  Rashwan had made sure Andersson hadn’t set foot on the ladder until Kemp reported that he was down safely. He trusted the carpenters with one person’s weight, but no more.

  Harlowe stood with Miles, watching the young woman disappearing into the darkness. “Envious?”

  “You ask bloody stupid questions, sometimes.”

  “Professor, this is just a quick look-see. When it comes to the real stuff we’ll lower you down, I promise. But there’s no way you could make that climb.”

  “I know,” she said simply. There was nothing more to be said on the matter — he was right, and she hated it, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it except watch Andersson’s blonde head vanish into the shadows and wonder what awaited her down there in the dark.

  She keyed the walkie-talkie Harlowe had given her. “Kemp? Can you hear me?”

  For a moment, her only answer was the fizzing of static. Then: “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “What are you seeing, for God’s sake?”

  “It’s dark…”

  “That’s why you’ve got a torch.” She gave Harlowe an exasperated look. He grinned at her, then started down the ladder himself.

  “I know, give me a second. It’s really cold down here… I can see my breath.”

  Miles still couldn’t understand that. She couldn’t imagine anything that could suck the heat out of a structure like that.

  “There’s a doorway here, open, more of a square arch at the base of the shaft. Behind it… My God, Laura, it’s huge!”

  “How huge?” she snapped. “What do you mean?”

  Voices echoed indistinctly from within the shaft. There was another burst of static from the radio, then Andersson’s voice issued from it: “It opens out a long way. I can’t quite make out the layout yet — everything’s made of that same black stone, and our light just sort of skates off it…” A few seconds passed, then Andersson spoke again.

  “There’s something underfoot, like a fine grit or dust. Um…Hold on, Kemp’s —”

  There was a shout from Kemp. Miles felt her heart jerk in her chest.

  “Greg? What’s wrong?” Andersson’s voice bounced. She was running. “Are you okay?”

  Miles dropped to her knees, ignoring the spike of pain from her hip, and stared down into the shaft. She could hear voices down there, echoing and impossible to discern, and every now and then the beam of a flashlight would scan past the bottom of the ladder.

  Kemp’s voice floated up to her through the echoes. He was laughing.

  “Am I dreaming? Are you guys seeing this?”

  Miles leaned as far in as she could, straining her ears. She heard Harlowe and Andersson, their voices attenuated by the stone as they too broke into delighted cries.

  Kemp was saying something about gold.

  The voices had dropped to murmurs. Miles tried to make out what they were saying, but the words weren’t reaching her. She keyed the radio frantically, but whatever her colleagues had seen down there had taken the memory of her from them.

  “Sod this.” She got up, the shouted into the shaft. “I’m coming down!”

  “Professor,” said Rashwan, his face creased with concern. “Please, just wait.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I will arrange something. A hoist. Laura, you will fall…”

  She reached out to him, touched his hand. “I’ve got see this. I’m sorry, Mohammed, but I’ve just got to.”

  Miles stepped down onto the ladder, her fingers shaking with the effort of holding on, and began to lower herself into the shaft. The first few rungs weren’t too bad. It was only when she had climbed down about a quarter of the way that the pain in her hip began to flare, and the weakness in her left leg became apparent.

  She stopped, breathing hard, trying to will the ache away. She had made a mistake, she knew, a stupid, prideful, impatient mistake, and now she was going to be stuck partway down the ladder and look like a bloody fool when somebody finally pulled her up again.

  Miles opened her mouth to call Rashwan, but before she could speak she heard a scream.

  It came from below her — a short, startled shriek of alarm. Miles froze, listening hard. She held her breath, said nothing, not wanting to miss whatever happened next.

  She didn’t have to wait long. Before she needed to take in more air there was another scream, longer and more terrified. It was Andersson. Miles heard Harlowe shout, echoes robbing the words of meaning, and then there was a flicker of light and the flat, nasty sound of a gunshot.

  Miles gasped, stunned at the sound of it. She could understand the screaming, awful as it was. There were any number of reasons why people would cry out in such a place — a rockfall, or gas, or a sudden inrush of water. She herself had screamed, when that pillar in the Samanud dig had come down and shattered her hip.

  But there was nothing she could imagine that would make someone fire a pistol in a tomb.

  As Miles hung there, pinned to the ladder by shock and fear, Andersson screamed again. This time, the scream went on for a long time. Then it wavered, changed to a choking rasp, to a dry, echoing series of sobs.

  To silence.

  Miles hooked an arm around the nearest rung, used the other to key the radio. “Anna?”

  There was nothing, just the faint hiss of background static. Then even that cut off.

  “Anna? Greg, are you there?”

  Only the dying echoes of her own words answered her. Miles glanced up, to see Rashwan’s head punctuating the square of light above her. Then there was a scraping sound from below, and Lucas Harlowe stumbled into view at the base of the shaft.

  He had no torch, but just enough light filtered down past Miles to see him turn, gun still in his hand, and fire twice into the shadows. Then he simply dropped the weapon and went for the ladder.

  Miles realized that she was blocking his way. She dropped the radio, saw it tumble past him, then used both hands to haul herself up a rung. The pain in her arms and shoulders was astounding, just from this brief effort, and her left leg was about to give way. If she was on the ladder for much longer, she knew, she would fall and take Harlowe with her.

  She heard his voice, thin an
d dry: “Please,” he croaked. “No.”

  Almost as if they had heard his plea, the shadows at the base of the shaft moved, gathered, and rose up in pursuit of him.

  The sight defeated Miles’ perceptions. Her first thought was that black wires were following him up the shaft, then that oily spiderwebs fluttered in his wake, then that he was about to be swamped by noisome threads of gas. It was smoke down there, it was shadow, it was an amorphous cloud of pure frozen darkness that was reaching out for him, touching, brushing at his skin and his hair and the whites of his eyes.

  It was none of these things. It was simply death, and at its touch, Lucas Harlowe withered away.

  In his last moments he reached out, his arm stretched imploringly towards her, or perhaps the light behind her, but the hand was already nothing more than paper and twigs. His arm contracted around its own corroding bone, his shoulder collapsed, his torso twisted and crumbled.

  He tried to speak, or to scream, but all that issued from the lipless hole that had once been a mouth was dust, and a sound like sandpaper on stone. An instant later his ravaged frame lost its battle with gravity, and it fell away to crash down the shaft, nothing more than powder and ash and blackening, shattering bone. What had been Lucas Harlowe vanished into the writhing dark, piece by tumbling piece, and was gone.

  It had taken a second to happen, maybe two. A few beats of the heart. And suddenly, Laura Miles was alone in the shaft with night-black threads spinning through the air towards her.

  The air around her grew suddenly, brutally cold. A hair-fine tendril of shadow brushed her finger, and her left arm became nothing, a lifeless weight at her elbow.

  There was no pain, just a wrenching absence. Miles could see the limb, but it was dead to her.

  She moaned, swung herself around, back to the ladder. Raised a foot, her boot like a ton weight, dragged herself up half a meter. And another, expecting at any second for that freezing death to reach up and take her as she climbed.

  Somehow she outran it.