STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Read online

  Just as the event horizon closed over his eyes, he saw that awful shadow break through the white sky, all edges and angles. And then he was gone.

  A tumbling, whirling fall through a space that could not exist, a speed where there could be no motion, light where there could be no vision, time where none existed…

  He stepped backwards onto the ramp, into the flat, warm air of Stargate Command. “Okay,” he snapped, turning around. “What the hell’s wrong with the…”

  There was a small army of marines at the base of the access ramp, weapons leveled.

  “Radio,” he finished.

  From behind him came a grinding, metallic squeal, like the closing of a giant’s rusty shears. Someone was shutting the iris.

  Daniel, Carter and Teal’c were still on the ramp, looking down at the armed men surrounding them. Daniel had his arms half-raised, as though he were considering surrender. “Ah, Jack? Any idea what’s going on here?”

  “Not much.” O’Neill picked a marine at random, fixed him with the kind of quiet, frozen look his drill sergeants used to use on him, back in the day. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be here for unscheduled activations?”

  The man swallowed. “Sorry, sir.”

  There was an echoing click as the gate room’s internal address system came on. “Security teams stand down,” it bellowed. “Repeat, stand down.”

  At that, the entire gate room seemed to fall still. The crimson beacons above the big security doors stopped rotating and switched off, the sirens wailing into silence. The doors unlocked and slid aside. And then even the Stargate shut down, the rippling blue light of it fading as the event horizon lost cohesion.

  There was the welcome sound of two dozen automatic weapons being switched to safety.

  “Is it just me,” O’Neill sighed, as the marines shouldered arms and filed away from the ramp, “or has today really not gone according to plan?”

  “Internal security alert,” said Carter, glancing around. “Level two?”

  “Level three, Major.”

  The voice was deep, with an edge of Texan twang, and O’Neill was very glad indeed to hear it. “General,” he smiled as Hammond stepped into the gate room. “Was it something I said?”

  “Sorry about that, Colonel.” Hammond didn’t look at all happy. “Things have been a little on edge around here for the past couple of hours.”

  “What happened?”

  “We got a message. From an old friend of yours.”

  O’Neill’s chest tightened a little. “Apophis?”

  “If only,” said Hammond. “It was Ra.”

  Chapter 4.

  Bedshaped

  The Stargate had begun to dial itself at three thirty-seven AM, not long after SG-1 had left for Sar’tua. Since it had been entirely possible that the team had run into trouble and needed to return ahead of schedule, the technicians monitoring the gate had been expecting an Iris Deactivation Code. Instead, what came through the wormhole was a multi-frequency signal of terrifying power.

  The communications system went into overload immediately. Most of the failsafe cut-outs — designed to protect the operations room’s delicate equipment from just such an assault — activated as their creators intended, but at least one didn’t shut off fast enough, leading to a feedback spike that blew out two servers and actually started a small fire. By the time the signal had finished transmitting some seventy seconds later, the gate room’s comms were completely down, leaving SG teams One, Seven and Fifteen stranded offworld.

  General George Hammond had ordered a level-three security lockdown as soon as he had been woken and appraised of the situation, by which time emergency repairs had already begun. And while most of the effort in the operations room had been devoted to getting the GDO reception array back online, there was also the question of the precise nature of the attack Stargate Command had been subjected to.

  It hadn’t taken all that long for the analysts to discover the truth. All they had needed to do was to lessen the signal’s strength by a factor of a thousand, and its exact nature became clear.

  The signal wasn’t a weapon.

  It was a voice.

  The voice was not human: there was a bass echo to it, a sibilant reverberation that spoke of an alien parasite working human vocal chords as though they were the strings of a puppet. There was little emotion in the words, just a breathy monotone, but there was something sneering to the voice too, something superior and contemptuous and just a little seductive. It was horrible.

  It was unmistakable. Hearing it made Daniel Jackson’s stomach knot.

  He looked warily around the briefing room as the recording played out. Samantha Carter was leaning slightly towards the tape deck, her head cocked slightly to one side as it often was when she was analyzing a new problem. Teal’c sat ramrod-straight, his hands clasped on the tabletop in front of him, face utterly impassive. At the end of the table, General Hammond was reading through one of the files stacked up in front of him. He had heard the recording before; its serpentine echoes held no surprises for him. And Jack…

  Daniel settled his glasses more comfortably on the bridge of his nose, and peered across the top of the tape deck at Jack O’Neill. The man was settled back in his chair, arms folded, his expression unreadable, his gaze fixed on a point several centimeters above the table. To someone who didn’t know him very well, he might have appeared to be listening.

  It was obvious to Daniel, though, that Colonel O’Neill was still under another sun.

  The voice silenced. Hammond reached out and switched the tape off. “That’s it,” he said. “Eighteen seconds of that, pause for three seconds, repeats twice. Nothing else.” He raised an eyebrow at Daniel. “Any thoughts, Doctor?”

  “Well, it’s definitely Ra.”

  “You’re sure?” Sam asked him.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “That confirms what we suspected.” Hammond closed the file. “We managed to pick his name out of the message, but if you’re certain that’s him…”

  Daniel frowned. “You know,” he said. “This really doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “No kidding,” Jack cut in. “General, Ra’s dead. I mean seriously, you couldn’t get any more dead. Someone’s working an angle.”

  “No…” Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose. The tape deck had come from the operations room, and he could still smell the smoke on it. His sinuses itched. “What I mean is, the message doesn’t make sense. At all. Unless my translation’s way off…”

  “And what is your translation, Doctor?”

  Daniel held his silence for a moment, thinking back to the alien words he had been listening to. All those years ago, when he had been face to face with Ra, when those awful syllables had been directed at him… There was a difference, he knew, something subtle that he couldn’t quite put a name to. Was it skewing his understanding of the message now?

  “Daniel?” prompted Sam.

  “Mm? Oh, okay…” He took a deep breath. “Ah, he starts off with something about a deep hole, or a pit, weeping or lamenting… Then Kt’uey, I think that’s ‘breached’, or maybe more like ‘defiled’…” He paused, until he saw Teal’c nod, very slightly. “Then he mentions a sacred seal or wall being built. Uh, ‘The sacred seals are in place and that which feeds is once again…’ Ana’chi kel may’ia va? Yeah, that’s weird.”

  “Please, Doctor,” said Hammond. “Just what you hear.”

  “Sure, sorry.” He spoke more quickly now, translating as directly as he could. “‘That which feeds is once again held in sleep. Those who dare defy the will of Ra, supreme of Heaven, will find eternal torment in the house of the…’” He looked across the table at Teal’c once more. “Eater of ash?”

  “It is as you say, Daniel Jackson. This message holds no meaning.”

  “Have you ever heard anything referred to as an ‘eater of ash’?” Hammond asked him.

  “Indeed. ‘Ash Eater’ is a common phrase among the Ja
ffa, especially children.” The ghost of a smile played about the man’s lips, as though he had remembered something amusing from long ago. “It means one who cannot stop eating — he will eat the meal, the cooking pot, the fire and the ash beneath.”

  Sam turned to Hammond. “General, I take it there are no clues as to where this message originated from?”

  “Not a one, Major.” He ran a hand back over his scalp. “And now that I’ve heard what it means, I’m beginning to think we’ve only heard part of it.”

  “It does sound like a fragment of something,” Daniel agreed. “If I’ve learned anything about the Goa’uld, it’s that they really like to let you know what they’re going to do to you. This is too, I don’t know… Ambiguous.”

  “System Lords do not usually repeat themselves,” Teal’c added.

  “Fine,” said Hammond, sitting back. “People, I think we’ve gone about as far as we can with this right now. We could debate the meaning of it all morning, but until we can gain further intelligence on this attack, I’m going to keep the security lockdown in place and devote all available resources to bringing the comms system fully online.”

  “Sir,” Sam began, “I’d like to analyze this further. There may be some kind of information in the carrier wave that can give us a point of origin.”

  “Major, what I need from you is to make sure another signal of this type can’t shut us down again. I can wait a little while longer before finding out where it came from.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “You’ll liaise with the tech team down in Operations as soon as we’re done here. Doctor Jackson, Teal’c, I want you to start running your translation through the databases. There’s already a copy in the lab — see if it matches anything we’ve met before.”

  Teal’c tipped his head a fraction. “As you wish.”

  “Colonel O’Neill, I’ll need your report on P2D-771 as soon as possible. I want to know more about this modified ship, and the speed of the Goa’uld response to that locator beacon.”

  For a few moments Jack said nothing at all. Then he started, appeared to realize suddenly where he was. “Absolutely, General. Anything else?”

  “Not for now.” He looked around, taking the four of them in. “I understand that things got a little rough back there, and I’m sorry you had to come home to all this. But until I’m sure we’re not going to get any more calls from Ra, the pressure’s got to stay high.”

  Jack stood up, his chair rolling back. “No problem. It’s what we do.”

  Hammond looked at him a little oddly — it wasn’t exactly procedure for a lower ranking officer to get up from the table before a General, but he seemed prepared to let it go. Maybe he could see the same thing in Jack’s eyes as Daniel had noticed. “Glad to hear it, Colonel. That’ll be all.”

  The team dispersed. Sam headed down the spiral stairway directly to the operations room, while Daniel and Teal’c followed Jack out through Hammond’s office to the elevators.

  Jack went straight to the right-hand elevator door without a word. Daniel found himself holding back for a moment, unwilling to break into the man’s reverie, but then remembered the look on Jack’s face when the Jaffa refugees had been taking their dead back through the Stargate. He stood next to him as the floor indicators counted down.

  “Hey,” he began.

  “Daniel.”

  “Look, do you want to grab a coffee or something before we start on this?”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Level 20. Daniel tried another tack. “How are the hands?”

  Jack raised them, looked at them oddly. There were dressings on some of the deeper lacerations, and the smaller cuts still looked angry and painful.

  “They’re fine.”

  “Jack…”

  The older man’s eyes locked on his. “Don’t.”

  “It wasn’t —”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  The elevator doors hissed apart. Jack stepped inside. “Happy translating,” he said, his hand up in an ironic wave, and then the doors were together again and he was gone.

  “Damn,” breathed Daniel. And then became aware that Teal’c was watching him intently. “What?”

  “You were attempting to lighten his mood?”

  “No, not really… I just wanted to let him know he shouldn’t blame himself.”

  “The blame lies with Apophis.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “As does Colonel O’Neill. But blame and responsibility are easily confused. It is the task of a leader to know the difference.”

  There was a soft chime as the second elevator reached their level. The doors slid apart. Daniel followed Teal’c inside, stood beside him as they closed again.

  “Should that make me feel better?” he asked.

  Teal’c said nothing while the elevator climbed. Only when it had reached its destination and opened again did he speak.

  “The blame does not lie with you either, Daniel Jackson.”

  Maybe, thought Daniel, as the two men left the elevator. But am I responsible?

  The notion would not leave him, no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on his work. The task of refining his translation of the message wasn’t quite difficult enough to drive it from his mind, especially with Teal’c there to fill in the gaps, and even re-writing it into Goa’uld hieroglyphs to send it worming back through the SGC databases couldn’t entirely distract him from it.

  At first, his feelings remained a mystery. Certainly, the deaths on Sar’tua had been tragic, but he had experienced worse. There had probably been occasions where he had been far more directly responsible for awful events — when he really looked back at those fateful hours on the plateau, the only thing that truly haunted him had been not speaking up about the locator beacon more quickly. But could anything have been done about it if he had? In all honesty, he doubted it. The device had been designed to attract help in all but the most dire circumstances. Sephotep wouldn’t have built the device to be easily disabled. It was only a complete and unexpected shutdown of the Tel’tak’s entire power system that had silenced it in the first place.

  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?”<
br />
  “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.”