Free STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust by Peter J. Evans Page A

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