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

had ordered a level-three security lockdown as soon as he had been woken and appraised of the situation, by which time emergency repairs had already begun. And while most of the effort in the operations room had been devoted to getting the GDO reception array back online, there was also the question of the precise nature of the attack Stargate Command had been subjected to.
    It hadn’t taken all that long for the analysts to discover the truth. All they had needed to do was to lessen the signal’s strength by a factor of a thousand, and its exact nature became clear.
    The signal wasn’t a weapon.
    It was a voice.
     
    The voice was not human: there was a bass echo to it, a sibilant reverberation that spoke of an alien parasite working human vocal chords as though they were the strings of a puppet. There was little emotion in the words, just a breathy monotone, but there was something sneering to the voice too, something superior and contemptuous and just a little seductive. It was horrible.
    It was unmistakable. Hearing it made Daniel Jackson’s stomach knot.
    He looked warily around the briefing room as the recording played out. Samantha Carter was leaning slightly towards the tape deck, her head cocked slightly to one side as it often was when she was analyzing a new problem. Teal’c sat ramrod-straight, his hands clasped on the tabletop in front of him, face utterly impassive. At the end of the table, General Hammond was reading through one of the files stacked up in front of him. He had heard the recording before; its serpentine echoes held no surprises for him. And Jack…
    Daniel settled his glasses more comfortably on the bridge of his nose, and peered across the top of the tape deck at Jack O’Neill. The man was settled back in his chair, arms folded, his expression unreadable, his gaze fixed on a point several centimeters above the table. To someone who didn’t know him very well, he might have appeared to be listening.
    It was obvious to Daniel, though, that Colonel O’Neill was still under another sun.
    The voice silenced. Hammond reached out and switched the tape off. “That’s it,” he said. “Eighteen seconds of that, pause for three seconds, repeats twice. Nothing else.” He raised an eyebrow at Daniel. “Any thoughts, Doctor?”
    “Well, it’s definitely Ra.”
    “You’re sure?” Sam asked him.
    “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”
    “That confirms what we suspected.” Hammond closed the file. “We managed to pick his name out of the message, but if you’re certain that’s him…”
    Daniel frowned. “You know,” he said. “This really doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
    “No kidding,” Jack cut in. “General, Ra’s dead. I mean seriously, you couldn’t
ge t
any more dead. Someone’s working an angle.”
    “No…” Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose. The tape deck had come from the operations room, and he could still smell the smoke on it. His sinuses itched. “What I mean is, the message doesn’t make sense. At all. Unless my translation’s way off…”
    “And what
is
your translation, Doctor?”
    Daniel held his silence for a moment, thinking back to the alien words he had been listening to. All those years ago, when he had been face to face with Ra, when those awful syllables had been directed at him… There was a difference, he knew, something subtle that he couldn’t quite put a name to. Was it skewing his understanding of the message now?
    “Daniel?” prompted Sam.
    “Mm? Oh, okay…” He took a deep breath. “Ah, he starts off with something about a deep hole, or a pit, weeping or lamenting… Then
Kt’uey
, I think that’s ‘breached’, or maybe more like ‘defiled’…” He paused, until he saw Teal’c nod, very slightly. “Then he mentions a sacred seal or wall being built. Uh, ‘The sacred seals are in place and that which feeds is once again…’
Ana’chi kel may’ia va?
Yeah, that’s weird.”
    “Please, Doctor,” said Hammond. “Just what