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

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