06 - Siren Song (9 page)

“My brain feels like scrambled eggs, but I don’t have a snake in my head, so
I’m doing better than some.” As she sat back on her heels, he pinned her with a
gaze that was sharper than it had a right to be after what Sebek had done to
him. “What the hell happened?”

Teal’c disengaged from his staring contest with the Jaffa guard and settled
onto one knee in front of them. He looked over his shoulder in the direction of
the guard before turning back and speaking in a low rumble. “We were disabled,
as were Sebek’s Jaffa. Sebek himself was in distress.”

“Or the host was,” Sam speculated.

The Colonel’s gaze sharpened even more. “Disabled how?”

She could tell he had an idea but was still gathering the pieces.

“You felt it, too, sir, in the antechamber. Pain, headache, nausea, um… paranoia.” She winced an unvoiced apology in the Colonel’s direction. “And—”
She faltered a little as she tried to grope for words to describe it.

“Memory,” Teal’c finished for her.

That was it. The word seemed to snap the disorientation, the disjointed
images, the wild swings of emotion into context. She nodded and settled back
against the wall next to the Colonel. It was difficult to pin down: a memory,
but not just pictures. “I could feel it,” she said. “I wasn’t just remembering.
I was
feeling
it.”

“What?” the Colonel asked.

She pressed her lips shut for a moment. “Jolinar. But not just her.” Shaking
her head in frustration, she tried to sort it out. “Her memories, but… not her
point of view.”

Involuntarily, her hands clenched into fists on her knees. There was a
sickening lurch inside as she thought about the antechamber, Sebek aiming the
ribbon device at the Colonel. Daniel had been so still, his glasses reflecting
the killing red. She’d been facing off against a Jaffa, and he’d been coming at
her, but he’d stopped, clutched at his stomach, fingers scrabbling at his pouch.
She’d been able to hear the squeaking scream of the symbiote inside him. Of
course she couldn’t have; the sound had been in her head, but it had been more
than that. It had been coming at her from outside, and it had been inside her,
winding around her spine, a voice hissing in her brain.

“Hosts,” she whispered. Her fingernails were making tiny crescent cuts in her
palms. How many millennia were encoded in Jolinar’s DNA? Generations. The
Nascian man she took had been terrified. The memory twisting at the base of her
skull, she opened her eyes, focused on Teal’c’s stony face.

She’d fallen and the pain in her knees when she’d hit the stone floor of the
antechamber had shocked her back to herself again.

When she’d looked up, Daniel was raising his head and there was blood on his
lips, and he’d smiled.

Her voice was thick. “I’m sorry, sir. I tried to get to him, I swear.”

Teal’c’s expression didn’t change, but he managed to convey sympathy anyway.
“I, too, was overcome with sensations.” Now his scowl deepened. “Adoration for
the god, Sebek,” he clarified, like he was confessing crimes. “It was most
unpleasant.”

“False god,” O’Neill said.

“False god,” Teal’c agreed.

Tilting her head so she could see the Colonel’s face better, Sam asked, “You,
sir?”

One eye closed in a wince as he looked into the middle distance and then down
at his hands in his lap. “Kanan,” he said finally.

“Oh,” Sam said, and that was totally inadequate and also way too much. She
averted her gaze, accidentally caught Teal’c doing the same, his eyes on the
floor in front of him like he was observing a moment of silence or waiting for
someone to hit him, and that wasn’t good to see, either. The ghost memory
twisted at the back of her head, and she lifted a hand to rub at it, just as the
Colonel was doing the same, their elbows bumping. He flicked a look sidelong at
her, a stiletto blade of warning and a taut wire of connection. When she dropped
her hand, he raised his to his neck, fingers digging into the spaces between his
vertebrae.

She watched his fingers grinding into his neck and the roaring seethed up in
her ears like foam on boiling water. As noisy as it was in her head, the silence
in the cell was heavy, the kind that dust settles in, disturbed only by the
infrasound vibration of the distant crushers and the even thud of pacing Jaffa
boots. Still on one knee, Teal’c was motionless except for his eyes, which
followed the guard as he passed slowly back and forth outside the bars. When he
was beginning his fifth circuit, Teal’c turned back to Sam and the Colonel and
raised his eyebrow.

“Kind of lively for a stationary picket, don’t you think?” O’Neill said.

Sam mirrored Teal’c’s nod. “Not exactly palace guard, sir,” she said.

The speculative expression on the Colonel’s face faltered for just a second,
and she knew that, like her, he was thinking of Teal’c back in the early days,
standing motionless for all the hours of his watch at the doorway of their
quarters on one of their first missions. Daniel had been observing him the
entire time. He and Teal’c had spent the rest of the long night discussing Jaffa
discipline and total commitment to assigned duties. Daniel had filled up half
his field journal with notes.

“They remain agitated,” Teal’c said. “This could be exploited.”

Nodding, the Colonel watched the guard with eyes narrowed in thought.

“Goa’uld,” Sam said, as the idea began to form, still drifting and shadowy
but coming clearer.

“What about them, besides the ‘they suck’?” O’Neill asked, without shifting
his attention.

Again, Sam groped in her mind, waiting for the picture, the relationships to
coalesce a little. After a moment, she gave it a shot. “The Jaffa and Sebek were
obviously affected.”

“It must have been a severe disruption for the Goa’uld to risk leaving his
host,” Teal’c added.

“Right, so the host is affected, too, like we all were.”

“Which means?” O’Neill made a ‘move along’ gesture with his good hand.
Outside the cell, the Jaffa paused to gaze impassively at them, and the Colonel
smiled tightly. “Still here. Thanks for checking.”

When the guard moved on again, Sam continued, “Well, there’s a common thread,
isn’t there? We all experienced memories, or… well, something, anyway, that
involved the Goa’uld. Jolinar, Sebek, Kanan. Why?” He gave her a “you’re asking
me?” face, and she had to smile a little. “The point is, there’s something, I
don’t know,
directed
about this disturbance. It’s not just the fumes or
the gravity or the fact that we haven’t eaten in two days.”

“And the effects are alleviated now,” Teal’c said.

“Right. So it’s got to do with the mine. With what’s behind that door.”

“That door Daniel is going to be opening any minute now.” The Colonel looked
at her steadily, and Sam shook her head.

“If it were so easy, he’d already have done it.”

“Unless Daniel Jackson was stalling for time,” Teal’c said.

“Oh, he wasn’t stalling,” the Colonel said. “Lots of writing, nifty puzzle.
Daniel was doing his best. You know it, I know it.” He leaned forward to look
into the hallway again before letting his head fall back against the wall. “But
Daniel figures everything out, eventually.”

Sam pictured Daniel’s hands, thought of him pressing the IDC and stepping
through the Stargate and into the ’gate room, and of the look of relief that
would be on the General’s face right before Sebek snapped his neck. Goosebumps
rose on her arms; she shivered and rubbed her bare skin, pushing away the
feeling. “If he can’t get into the mine, he still has one place he
can
go,” she said softly. “One code he
does
know.”

The Colonel turned his gaze toward the back wall, so she couldn’t see his
face. After a long moment, he said, “We can’t let it get that far.”

Sam’s heart thudded in her chest. She’d thought about it before—after
Jolinar’s death years ago, and again when the Colonel had been implanted by
Hathor. She’d imagined the moment when she would have to kill her friends—quickly, to spare them the unending torture of possession by a Goa’uld. Her
hands had been covered in the blood of friends before, but never like this. A
part of her had believed it would never happen.

But they’d been lucky, and Daniel’s luck had apparently run out. After all
his narrow escapes, all the times he’d been close to death and survived or come
back from things even worse than death—to die at the hands of his friends…

Sam looked at the Colonel’s face, the thin line of his lips and the set of
his jaw, and knew she would not be the one to deliver the fatal wound. She would
bear the same guilt, though. There was no relief in it, for her.

“I do not believe Sebek wishes to separate himself from the technology inside
the vault,” Teal’c said. “He could easily have left this world in the hands of his First Prime, but he has not.”

“No.” The Colonel’s fingers twitched in his lap. “He’s staying right here.
Where we can get our hands on him.”

Sam flinched at the explicit reminder.

“We are vastly outnumbered. We will not be able to get close to him.”
Teal’c’s voice was low and even, but Sam knew it was not that easy.

“We’ve been outnumbered since this started,” O’Neill said. “Nothing’s
different now.”

“He may move on to someone else,” Sam suggested, a little desperate. The
Colonel didn’t look at her.

Teal’c’s slight hesitation was more telling than the quietness of his voice.
“And if he does, he will leave this host in the same condition as his previous
host.”

“There’s always a chance, Teal’c,” she snapped. He inclined his head,
deferring the argument. There was no point, and she was ashamed of herself the
moment he looked away. “Teal’c,” she began, but just then the guard wheeled
around in front of the door as another joined them.

“Move to the rear,” one of the Jaffa ordered, as he maneuvered into their
space, holding a staff weapon on them. The end of the weapon bumped against the
side wall. Slowly, Sam got to her feet and backed away, hands half-raised.

A young boy came stumbling into the cell, prodded along at the end of a staff
weapon. His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes hung from his body like
tatters from a scarecrow. Sam frowned; the bones of his wrists jutted out at
sharp angles, and he looked as though he had not eaten well in a long time. One
of the Jaffa shoved him hard enough to knock him down, and next to her, the
Colonel tensed. He got up and took one step forward. “Leave the kid alone.”

“Mind your business, Tauri,” the Jaffa snarled, and raised the staff weapon a
little higher, right to chest-level. The Colonel held up one hand, a gesture of
understanding, but he was still rigid with anger. They watched as the guards
threw the boy down against the wall, then backed away. “Do not speak to him,”
the Jaffa ordered them. “He is none of your concern.”

“Right,” the Colonel said, and Sam knew without looking at him that he had no
intention of following that command.

She didn’t, either.

It took a few minutes for the guard to resume his normal patrols, back and
forth at five times the regular rate. As soon as it happened, Jack dropped to
one knee and edged closer to the boy, who was curled against the wall, his head
lowered onto his grubby arms.

“Hey,” O’Neill whispered. “Kid. We’re not going to hurt you.”

Refusing to look up, the boy shrank away as though he could dissolve into the
brick.

“Sir. He has no reason to trust us.”

“Perceptive,” he replied. She gave him a look that should have withered his
sarcasm, but she was off her game and the Colonel was focused on the boy.

“We are prisoners,” Teal’c said, “like you.”

The boy lifted his head and fixed Teal’c with a startling blue gaze full of
hate. “You’re nothing like me.” He looked from Teal’c to the Colonel to Sam, but
his expression never changed. No curiosity, no softness; just a blazing anger.
“You want to trick me.” His eyes darted toward the shadow of the passing guard.
“I’m not stupid, and I don’t
have
anything,” he protested, his voice
cracking. He pressed his lips into a thin line.

Crouching next to the Colonel, Teal’c answered, “We want nothing from you.”

“You
always
want something,” the boy growled. “Jaffa take.”

“Not all Jaffa.”

The boy made a noise of disgust. He glared at the tattoo on Teal’c’s
forehead, gathered a mouthful of spit and aimed it at Teal’c’s face.

“Hey!” the Colonel snapped. The boy’s head whipped around, and he stared at
the Colonel without remorse, then looked away again.

Teal’c rose and wiped the spittle from his forehead with the back of his
hand. He stared at it for a long moment, then said finally, “Do not admonish
him, O’Neill. There are many who have the right to do as he has done.”

Sam shook her head wearily. “Teal’c, you can’t take the blame for all Jaffa
everywhere in the galaxy.” She turned to the boy, whose brow was furrowed, for
once something other than anger showing in his eyes. “We don’t want to trick
you. And we don’t want to hurt you. We want to get out of here, just like you
do. And Teal’c isn’t what you think.”

His eyes shifting from her to the Colonel to Teal’c, the boy leaned forward a
little. “Teal’c?” he asked. His eyes narrowed to suspicious slits again.

“Yes,” Teal’c confirmed.

The Colonel hooked his thumb in Teal’c’s direction. “You know him?”

“Shol’va,”
he answered, without the edge of derision the word usually
carried. He shifted his gaze to O’Neill. “You’re SG-1, aren’t you?”

The Colonel let a thin smile warm his face a little. “Our reputation precedes
us. I’m Jack. That’s Carter.”

“Where’s the other one?”

The smile faded. “He’s in the mine, with Sebek.”

For a moment the kid’s gaunt face held no expression at all, but slowly his
mouth hardened and the anger was back. “He lied,” he said, finally, through
clenched teeth.