STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 7

  “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 t
o 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.

  “You might want to hold on to something,” he told Sam. And put his foot down.

  There was a golden quality to the observation ward. Daniel had expected it to be brighter, more stark and antiseptic, but there were fabric blinds at the windows that attenuated the sunlight into glowing shafts of amber. The walls were plain, a color he couldn’t even identify, but the filtered light warmed them, and the linoleum floor between the beds was broken into a soft chequer of sun and shadow.

  He paused at the threshold, looking in, but oddly unwilling to intrude further. The ward was very quiet. Somewhere a machine bleeped gently, and there was a snuffling, a rustle of clean cotton bedclothes as somebody turned over. Apart from that, and the faint, continual hum of the air conditioning, there was only silence.

  Daniel found himself thinking more of a museum than a hospital ward.

  “Daniel?” Sam was just behind him. Her voice was hushed, but he could hear the subtle edges of her impatience. He didn’t answer her, just steeled himself and stepped inside, the tennis shoes he had been given at the airbase making no sound on the hard floor.

  There was a nurse’s station just inside the door. Daniel announced himself to the woman who sat there, and they spoke in Arabic for a few moments; he explaining who he was — or at least who he was pretending to be — and she warning him that his aunt’s condition was severe, and that two visitors might be enough to impair her recovery. A compromise was quickly reached. Sam would stay and wait for a doctor to explain more about Laura Miles’ injuries and how they were being treated, while Daniel would visit her alone.

  Miles was in the bed at the far end of the ward, closest to the intensive care unit. In effect, she was hovering between the two wards, not well enough to have been discharged from the ICU but stable enough to no longer need machines assisting her lungs and heart. That situation, the nurse told Daniel, could change at any time, and he must be prepared for this.

  The bed was surrounded by curtains, sealing it off entirely from the rest of the ward. Daniel walked hesitantly over to it, lifted an edge of white fabric.

  It took him several seconds to recognize the woman who lay there. When he had last seen Laura Miles she had been in her mid-fifties, slender in a way that spoke of hard physical work in bad conditions, her hair, a peppery mix of jet-black and silver, always dragged back from her angular face and tied thoughtlessly with a rubber band. She was animated, angry, short-tempered, fiercely intelligent, prone to bouts of swearing so florid and inventive that on more than one occasion Daniel had been forced to hunt down a dictionary to find out exactly what she’d called him.

  They had never been friends. But when his theories had led to the established archaeological community turning its collective back on him, Laura Miles was one of the people he’d missed most of all.

  The bed before him cradled someone very different. This woman wasn’t slender, she was shrunken, emaciated, her skin pale parchment over birdlike bones. A small reading lamp had been left on over the pillow and its light turned her face into a patchwork of white skin and black shadow. He couldn’t see her eyes at all, just the deep pits of her sockets, as though he were looking at an x-ray, at the structures and failing mechanics lying just beneath the surface.

  Her hair was almost completely white, and the way it was spread over the pillow was all wrong for Miles. Daniel found himself looking around for a rubber band.

  There was a chair next to the bed, on her right side. He stepped through the curtains and sat down.

  “Laura?” he said, very quietly.

  On the other side of the bed a monitor made almost imperceptible sounds, and from outside the curtain came faint voices; Sam and a man that Daniel could only assume was the doctor.

  Within the curtains, nothing moved. Miles hardly even seemed to be breathing.

  “Laura,” he said again, louder this time. “It’s Daniel Jackson. Can you hear me?”

  There was no response. Daniel grimaced. He’d come a long way for nothing if she was going to stay asleep.

  He rose a little from the chair, looking across the woman’s body. For the first time he saw that her left arm was gone, severed just above the elbow, and the stump heavily bandaged. There was something odd about the skin of her arm above the bandage, though. Daniel leaned over her, making very sure not to touch any part of her or the bed. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if she suddenly awoke to find him looming over her.

  There was a patch of bare skin between the bandage around Mile’s upper arm and the white gown she wore. Daniel had been expecting to see evidence of burning there, or a crush injury — what little he had been able to learn from the police report into her injuries had made him envision some explosion or rockfall. But the skin was smooth, and unblemished apart from a strange mottling, like the spread of dark veins in white marble.

  The left side of her face was marked in the same way, ashen and swirled with a sprawl of bluish tracks.

  Daniel winced, and slowly sat back down. The voices outside the curtain had stopped. He leaned close to the sleeping woman and touched her arm.

  He skin was cold. It was like touching a corpse. He jerked his hand back reflexively, and as he did so the curtains moved behind him.

  It was Sam, peeking through. She said nothing, but moved her head to beckon him outside.

  He followed her, moving a short dist
ance away from the curtained bed. “Find out anything?”

  “Not much.” She had folded her arms tightly around herself, as though cold. “What about you? Has she said anything?”

  He shook his head. “She’s asleep. I can try waking her up, but I don’t know how responsive she’ll be.”

  “You’ve got to try.”

  “I know.” He looked away. “So what did the doctor say?”

  “Daniel, I don’t think they know what’s wrong with her.” She glanced back along the ward, to make sure no-one was close, and even though they were alone she kept her voice to a murmur. “He says that her arm was gone when she arrived, and that the wound margins were completely dry and… Crumbling. He’s thinking maybe a chemical burn, or maybe even radiation, because it looks like there are a bunch of secondary lesions in the lymph nodes and muscle tissue around the injury. So far she’s being medicated for pain relief and to keep her this side of organ failure, but until they know what happened to her they can’t really do all that much.” She gave a small shrug, restricted by her folded arms. “They just don’t have a diagnosis that fits the facts.”

  “That’s no burn,” muttered Daniel. “Whatever she found out there…” He trailed off, his thoughts too chaotic to go further. “I’ll try to talk to her again.”

  “Sure. Take your time.”

  “Something tells me we don’t have too much of that,” he said softly, then walked back to re-enter Laura Miles’ silent, bed-shaped world.

  Nothing had changed since he was last here. He sat down again, willing himself to more positive action, but the idea of shaking this stricken soul back to wakefulness seemed brutal, alien. This might have been the first peace she’d been afforded since her injury. What right did he have to rob her of that?

  He was on the verge of turning away when she stirred.