06 - Siren Song (4 page)

As the numbers and letters rolled off his tongue, he let his gaze scan the
outer ring of the
ha’tak,
a familiar game, picking his targets. The
mothership seemed worse for wear—although in better shape than its counterpart
on the planet’s landing platform—and in a number of places the shielding was
patchy and the interior decks were exposed to hard vacuum. He could make out the
tiny, insectlike flitting of repair drones swarming around a new breach and
snorted out a laugh. One dead-on plasma burst would tear open that whole section
and cripple the ship, if anyone wanted to take the planet. But that was just it:
nobody did. The
ha’tak
bristled at nothing, defended the planet from
nothing but the galaxy’s indifference. Aris drifted on.

His authorization received, he goosed the sublight engines and vectored
toward the planet. For a moment, the ship shuddered and Aris was pushed back in
his seat while the inertial dampeners struggled lamely to realign forces. The
hyperspace drive gave a hiccup, and a hyperspace window partially formed ahead
of the ship only to collapse again, sending a wave of distortion out in all
directions.

Over the com, the duty officer barked a query, and Aris grumbled a reply, the
last bit about trashy Goa’uld workmanship prudently kept under his breath.

He couldn’t afford to be too picky. After destroying the last one, he’d been
lucky to get a ship out of Sebek at all. It was bad enough to have pissed off
Sokar by ditching not only his Tok’ra target but the consolation prize—Teal’c—as well. That had been nothing, however, compared to coming home by Stargate
empty-handed: no
tel’tak,
no payment, no useful intel to sell to Sebek,
and hoping he wouldn’t be killed the moment he stepped through the ’gate.
Two-and-a-half years was long enough to go without transportation, to play nice
with a Goa’uld and trade without a position of strength, to have to travel by
’gate and by paying passage or, more often, by stealing transportation offworld
lest he lose the independence of his income. But Aris was a patient man, and if
the
tel’tak
he’d been given was barely spaceworthy, well, it was still
spaceworthy, and that was enough. He’d had time to build up Sebek’s trust, such
as it was, and to pay attention to what was going on in the galaxy.

If all went well, he wouldn’t be forced to serve the Goa’uld much longer.

That thought brought him back to the planet, which was now a half-circle as
the
tel’tak
traced its slow arc dayward. Nightside, there were no lights
visible at all—not that he expected any—although he could imagine that, back
when that first Goa’uld
ha’tak
had lunged into orbit from hyperspace,
there had been at least a hint, something tantalizing, a glitter of occupation.
Now there was only the rumple of cloud cover—and darkness. Today, as usual, a
storm was spinning in the southern hemisphere, on the edge of the terminator,
its arms outflung across a quarter of the world, its eye blankly staring upward.
From here, though, he could smooth it with his thumb. But he kept his hands on
the controls and squinted as the sun flared on the curved edge of darkness,
flooded the cockpit with hard, white light, and blotted out the stars.

From space, his planet was beautiful again. He could imagine it as it was
before the Goa’uld had come, before his people had been slaughtered and the
young ones enslaved. The sight of
ha’taks
settling down to the ground, the screams of terror and the death that surrounded
them all, were fresh in his memory. It had been hard to overcome his hatred, to
smile and joke and deal with the Goa’uld, to find ways to flatter them and
nurture their greed, increasing his value to them. He’d long ago traded his
integrity for the sake of his life and the lives of those he had a duty to
protect. But he hadn’t been able to protect them, in the end, and the life of a
hunter was much the same as that of a slave. He had no options, no way out, no
true freedom. It was simply a form of servitude more pleasant than the choking
death in the bowels of the mines.

Aris adjusted the velocity and let the ship fall into the planet’s gravity
well, angling toward the northern hemisphere where the storm’s tattered edges
meant wind and rain and numbing cold. The heat shielding held up against
reentry, but warnings flared in red on the holographic readout on the
viewscreen. Goa’uld script made everything—even good wishes, he suspected—look nasty. He turned off the alarms and hung on while the ship bucked down
through the churning atmosphere. The pilot interface translated into mere
numbers the hazards of wind sheer and gravity and all kinds of resistance, so
his struggle to keep the ship from spinning was more mental than physical.
Still, the muscles of his arms tensed anyway, corded with the effort even though
his touch remained light and nimble on the controls. Overtaxed, the inertial
dampeners went offline, and for a second Aris was pulled in two directions at
once when the ship barrel-rolled and the internal gravity fought with the
planet’s. He shut the ship’s gravity plating down, got the
tel’tak
flying straight and upright again, skimming a ceiling of roiling clouds and
buffeted by sheets of rain.

There had been a moment in his youth, a day when he’d had to make a choice.
The risk had been great when he’d snapped the neck of a faithless Jaffa whose
fear of his god was not enough to keep him honest. His prize could have earned
him instant death, but it impressed Sokar enough to give him the tools he
needed: access to the Stargate, and basic weapons. From there Aris had built his
reputation, first with Sokar, and then with other Goa’uld who understood the
value of barter for things they couldn’t obtain without drawing too much attention to their activities. He was indiscriminate in the jobs he
took. He couldn’t afford a conscience, even when it kept him awake at night.

He leaned forward a little and peered down at familiar territory. From this
altitude, the mountain ranges, one for each finger on his right hand, were
parallel creases running north to south, divided by bands of snow and, in one
vast valley, the black snake of a river. Dayward, there was an angled cage of
white and grey, shafts of sunlight spearing between banks of clouds and setting
a distant ocean on fire. But the clouds closed ranks and the scintillation of
water dulled to steel once he turned the
tel’tak
inland, gliding downward
until it seemed to scrape the bare peaks with its belly. Here, the turbulence
was worse, tossing the
tel’tak
like a die in a cup, so he slipped into
the widest of the valleys and followed its curving path into the shelter of the
cliffs, lower and lower, until he could make out individual trees on the valley
floor and the rubble of the moraine that lay scattered behind the retreating
glaciers.

It was a circuitous route, but from down here he didn’t have to see the scars
in each of the two valleys on either side, dayward, nightward, where the cities
used to be. Now there were only fields of tumbled stone below the mountains, the
black scoring of orbital bombardment still visible above the treeline.

At the end of this valley, the glacier hung precariously from the edge of a
cliff, spilling itself in a waterfall that, even in the early morning light, was
brilliantly turquoise. Aris leveled off at the next plateau and then plummeted
again, pulling up at the river’s surface and shooting out the end of the valley,
through a notch between sheer rock faces and over the open plain below.

Here, the darkness lay at the feet of the mountains like a panting dog,
heavier, dirtier. The cargo ship slipped between layers of smog. Below it the
river fell away, blackened and sickly, sliding over the last of the plateaus
into the city. There were a few lights here, haloed in the sooty air. Someone
was home.

“Home,” he said out loud, with a twisted smile. The word tasted like acid on
his tongue. He circled around the golden apex of the pyramid that rose from the
black clouds like a parody of the mountains around it, and aimed the ship at a landing pad obscured by banks of
steam belching from valley floor.

Inertial dampeners, Jack decided, were overrated, or maybe Aris Boch hadn’t
bothered with them when he went for the upgrade package on the
tel’tak.
Either way, Jack was happy he had a pilot’s stomach, because the ship was
bouncing around like a cork on a stormy sea, and the green cast of Daniel’s face
meant he was taking the metaphor a little too seriously. After a moment of
complete weightlessness the floor rose up under them, only to fall away again.
Jack hooked his fingers into the strap of Daniel’s empty holster and yanked him
down onto the floor before he could fall on top of Jack and break something
important.

Teal’c was braced with one wide hand and one foot on either side of the
frame, his shoulders hunched. The ship lurched one way and then overcorrected,
throwing Carter into Jack and sandwiching him between her and Daniel. Jack
slumped even lower against the wall, gasping against the weight of his own
bones.

Once he managed to lift his head a little, he found Teal’c on his knees.
“Aris Boch has increased the internal gravity,” Teal’c said between gritted
teeth. He collapsed onto the floor and rolled laboriously onto his back.

“No kidding,” Jack managed, before the world telescoped to a bright prick of
light and winked out.

When he opened his eyes, he was still on the floor, feeling like his limbs
were being held down by sandbags. It took a second for him to register that he
was half right. Carter had fallen onto his left leg and still lay draped
face-down over him, her spiky blond hair hiding part of his boot.

“Heavy,” Daniel said and after a beat drawled, “Man.”

“Very funny,” Jack replied with a grimace as he got his elbows under himself
and levered himself up. The weight was easing a little now. Daniel’s face
started to go green again. “Don’t you dare,” Jack warned him and wiggled his
foot next to Carter’s head. “C’mon, Major. My leg’s asleep.”

With a groan she managed to get to her hands and knees.

“What the hell was that?” Jack demanded. He pulled his leg out from under her
and circled his ankle. Pins and needles stabbed all the way to his hip. He
flipped open his watch. Twenty minutes.

“Maybe malfunction in the gravity plates, sir,” she suggested to the floor.
“Or maybe a black hole too close to the hyperspace window—”

“Or maybe I like to see you flopping around like brentle fish, all
disoriented and easy to handle,” Aris Boch said from the doorway. With a swift
kick, he deflected Teal’c’s off-balanced lunge and, slamming him into the deck,
stood on his spine and rammed the muzzle of his gun into the back of Teal’c’s
neck. “Stand up,” he ordered, jerking his head toward the door. “Play nice and I
won’t kill anybody. Yet.”

Daniel heaved himself to his feet and, steadying himself against the wall,
said in a low, steady tone, “I’m not going to help you if you hurt them.”

“I’m going to hurt them if you don’t help me,” Aris replied, mimicking Daniel
exactly.

“Oh, please,” Jack growled. The two men—Aris broad-shouldered in his armor,
Daniel in rumpled BDUs—stood on opposite sides of the cargo bay and stared
each other down. Jack resisted whistling the opening bars of
Rawhide.
All
they needed was some blowing tumbleweed and a lurid sunset to give them dramatic
shadows. Jack shifted his weight impatiently. After a day of sitting on his ass,
it was time to move. “Can we take the standoff outside? This place is giving me
a headache.”

And it was. Whatever Aris had done to the gravity plates, being on the ground
wasn’t helping, and Jack still felt like there were lead weights around his
ankles. When they filed out ahead of Aris and his gun, Jack was pretty
disappointed to discover that the problem wasn’t with the ship but with the
planet.

“Oh great,” he muttered. “One of those.”

Carter stumbled across the threshold into the grey light and said, “Gravity’s
substantially higher than Earth’s.”

“Yeah, got that.” Jack tried not to drag his feet. It was undignified.

“Welcome to Atropos,” Aris said, and swung his free arm expansively to take
in the whole landscape.

Suddenly, the gaudy golden interior of the
tel’tak
didn’t look so bad.

Atropos wasn’t exactly a pretty planet. Once upon a time it might have been a
lovely vacation spot; Jack could see the appeal of the sweeping mountains and
waterfalls. But now even the water seemed depressed by the place and fell with
sluggish oiliness, made heavy by silt. The sun was a bleary eye peering between
two peaks, and the mountains cast cold shadows into the valley beneath them.
From their vantage point on the landing above the valley, Jack followed the
biggest of the rivers as it made its tortured way between its banks and into the
city below. Its black gleam was visible between the tumbled angles of buildings
designed, it seemed, after the school of ramshackle. There were a few crooked
spires still standing. One tower in particular curved up above the rest like the
fin of a shark and glowed dully, silver edged with sunrise-red. Jack wondered
what kind of sea monster was cruising under the chop. The rest of the city,
though, looked like it had been kicked over by a bratty kid on the beach, whole
sections flattened around the familiar footprints of orbital bombardment. The
craters’ edges were probably still black, their bottoms still crackling glass,
but it was hard to tell because the city had sort of scabbed over, and a motley
collection of tents and lean-tos and makeshift structures encrusted the blasted
spaces.

On its landing platform in the middle of the city, dwarfing even the shark’s
fin tower, the mothership caught the light, honey and red, the only patch of
real color in the valley. It could only be described as smug. Pretentious.
Jewelled. Squatting in the rubble of a civilization. In short: Goa’uld.