Oceans of Dust
Peter J. Evans
An original publication of Fandemonium Ltd, produced under license from MGM Consumer Products.
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METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER Presents
RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON
in
STARGATE SG-1™
MICHAEL SHANKS AMANDA TAPPING CHRISTOPHER JUDGE
DON S. DAVIS
ExecutiveProducers BRAD WRIGHT
MICHAEL GREENBURG RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON
Developed for Television by BRAD WRIGHT & JONATHAN GLASSNER
STARGATE SG-1 is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. ©1997-2012 MGM Television Entertainment Inc. and MGM Global Holdings Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
STARGATE ATLANTIS is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. ©2004-2012 MGM Global Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved.
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Lion Corp. ©2012 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Photography and cover art: Copyright ©2012 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written consent of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
To Nicola
For research, for coffee, and for being able to put up with me.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Terminal Frost
Chapter 2. Riders on the Storm
Chapter 3. Goodnight, Travel Well
Chapter 4. Bedshaped
Chapter 5. Hole to Feed
Chapter 6. Into Dust
Chapter 7. Learning to Fly
Chapter 8. White Queen
Chapter 9. High and Dry
Chapter 10. Black Burning Heart
Chapter 11. Overdrive
Chapter 12. Black and Gold
Chapter 13. A Dustland Fairytale
Chapter 14. Canned Heat
Chapter 15. Frozen
Chapter 16. The Bad Touch
Chapter 17. Little Black Cloud
Chapter 18. Hurt
Chapter 19. Old Friends
Chapter 20. Vertigo
Chapter 21. Feeling Gravity’s Pull
Chapter 22. Ray of Light
Epilog. Starlight
Author’s Note:
This story takes place in Stargate: SG-1 Season 4, between the episodes ‘Upgrades’ and ‘Crossroads’.
Thanks to everyone who helped me out on this one, especially Sally and Tom at Fandemonium for letting me write it. Large and expensive drinks go to the informational James Swallow and the inspirational Heather Wallace, without whom this book would have been a far lesser thing than it is. And high-fives all round to the Pubmeet crew, for recharging my enthusiasm batteries on a monthly basis.
Chapter 1.
Terminal Frost
Laura Miles saw a dead man on her way to the dig site.
He appeared to her like a vision, out of the golden dawn haze, by the side of the El-Fayoum highway. Kemp, who was driving, must have seen him too, because Miles didn’t even get time to shout before the SUV was lurching to a halt.
The vehicle had been moving fast. Miles had to brace herself against the back of Kemp’s seat as the brakes came on, and Andersson, who had been dozing in the front, was thrown forwards into the dashboard. She yelped, the seatbelt yanking her back.
Miles, startled by the sight, barely heard her.
Kemp reversed, slowly. The SUV pulled up close to the dead man and stopped, the engine idling.
Miles sat quite still, one hand against the back of Kemp’s seat, the other over her eyes to block out some of the glare. The sun was coming up, a molten crescent against the desert’s black horizon, and shafts of harsh light were cutting towards her across the sand. They outlined the dead man, making a halo of his white cotton headscarf, and forced Miles’ eyes almost closed.
Inside the SUV, no-one spoke for a long time.
The dead man was sitting by the side of the road, his back against an upturned cart. He must have been driving it along the edge of the highway when some speeding vehicle had collided with him, hurling his body into the sand. He’d lived for a while, Miles decided, after the impact; long enough to drag himself back to the cart, to prop himself against it, maybe to wait for help that never came.
Miles shivered, feeling queasy and strange. She had seen dead men before, many times, but they had been changed by the hot sand of the desert: their skins dry paper, their skulls hollow, their hearts black wisps clinging to the insides of canopic jars. This man might have been asleep, save for his one open eye and the swarms of flies already feasting on his tears.
“We should call somebody,” she breathed.
Kemp shook his head. “We probably shouldn’t.”
“What?” That was Andersson, quietly aghast. “We can’t just leave him out there!”
“Yes we can,” said Kemp, his voice a flat whisper. He was looking straight ahead now, through the windshield, not at the corpse. “It’s a highway. Someone will see him.”
“But —”
“Anna, I’m sorry. But if we call this in we’ll get involved, and Harlowe will throw a fit. You know what he’s like.”
Miles knew that arguing wasn’t going to do any good. Not with Harlowe visiting the dig. “He’s right,” she said. “I hate it, but he’s right.”
“Så jävla typiskt!” Andersson hissed, sitting back with her arms folded. “All right, if you’re so frightened of Harlowe. Drive on.”
“I’m —”
“I hope he haunts your dreams!”
“Kemp, just go,” Miles snapped. “Before somebody drives past and thinks we killed the poor bugger.”
“I’m sorry,” repeated Kemp. Then he turned the wheel and brought the SUV around in a sharp turn towards the east. Miles felt the tires leave tarmac and bounce solidly onto packed sand.
Andersson reached up for the grab-handle above the window and held on. “I hate all these secrets,” she muttered.
“Not long now,” Kemp replied. “Things will be back to normal soon.”
Normal. He’d been saying that for a week, ever since they had first struck stone.
Miles risked one more glance back as they drove away. The dead man sat as if content, his one open eye gazing out towards the dig site. He was looking at where she was going.
Miles didn’t like that. It felt like a bad sign, an omen. As if the dead knew more of her business here than the living.
Around her, the desert grew hot.
Deserts are defined by their extremes. In western Egypt, it is not uncommon for daylight temperatures to peak at a searing fifty centigrade. At night, frost can form, in those scattered places where moisture remains in the air.
This is the rhythm of the place: roast and freeze, over and over, forever. It is a brutal process, a ceaseless hammer that turns mountains into hills, hills into rubble, rubble into fine sand that heaps into wandering, wind-scoured dunes a thousand kilometers from end to end. It is erosion, it is demolition; it is the way the desert remakes itself.
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 sh
ow 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.
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 1
