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

and bring the gear up.”
    “Understood. Carter out.” She got up. “Come on,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Let’s find a way down.”
    Teal’c gestured to the east side of the site. “I believe there is a scree slope in this direction, Major Carter.”
    She peered out into the green darkness, but saw nothing. “You saw that from the photos?”
    “I did not.”
    “Okay…” Was he even wearing the goggles? She checked, and noticed that he was. How low he needed the gain set was anyone’s guess, though. “Lead on, Macduff.”
    “I believe it is ‘
Lay
on’, Major Carter.”
    The Jaffa began striding down a jumble of broken rock and shifting sand, part of the curving rock wall that had shattered away to reveal the TIAMAT anomaly months earlier. Carter, slightly less sure of her footing, eased her way down behind him. “Give me a break, Teal’c. Everyone gets that line wrong.”
    “That is what led me to remember it.”
    He stepped off a jagged slope of sandstone, instantly dropping into a combat stance, staff weapon held at the ready. Carter watched his great head swinging slowly left and right, scanning for threats, and for a moment needed no reminding that he had been born a very long way away indeed.
    She jumped down to ground level, bringing her MP5 up to cover Teal’c’s blind side. Her failure to spot any movement at the site was no indication that they could relax. Until she was completely sure she and Teal’c were alone here, she would stay combat-ready. To do otherwise was to invite the same fate as Laura Miles, and Carter had every intention of avoiding that.
    They began to move slowly through the site, one scampering forwards a few meters while the other covered, then switching positions, gradually eliminating every possible place an enemy might hide. They found no threats, but everywhere there was evidence of a panicked and hasty retreat — upturned tables, dropped tools, discarded notebooks. Carter almost tripped over the abandoned wheelbarrow, now half-covered in the shifting sand, and seeing it gave her an ugly thrill of recognition.
    Much of the debris was scattered around the edges of a deep pit near the overhang. Carter went back to it after the sweep was completed, and peered down into its shadows.
    A slab of pure darkness leered at its centre, surrounded by discarded tools. “They left in a hurry, all right.”
    “And have not returned,” Teal’c replied quietly.
    Carter hadn’t thought of that. Thirty hours had passed since Miles had been attacked, if her injuries had occurred at the same time that Ra’s message came through the Stargate. Wouldn’t somebody have come back to the dig site to investigate before now?
    The thought was, if anything, more troubling than that of the dig’s initial, hurried evacuation. It didn’t take much to make the average person flee for his life, not in Carter’s experience. But to make him run and keep on running, to not return at all…
    There was a sound behind her, a distant, rattling growl. She spun around, bringing the MP5 up against her shoulder, and a few seconds later saw the Wrangler’s angular prow emerge over the far dunes. It was a welcome sight, but she kept her weapon aimed until she could clearly see O’Neill’s face through the windshield. Theirs could not be the only Jeep in Egypt.
    “All clear, sir,” she reported as he turned off the engine and got out. “You were right about missing the action.”
    “Great.” He hauled the goggles of his face, took a moment to rub the bridge of his nose vigorously, then reached back into the Wrangler’s tangled stacks of gear. “Damn things never fit me right,” he muttered.
    “Sir?”
    “Aha!” He pulled out a big, army-issue flashlight and switched it on, scanning the beam around. “Better. Lots better.”
    The beam glared like a searchlight in Carter’s goggles. She tugged them from her head, shaking her hair back into some kind of shape once they were off. Without