06 - Siren Song (18 page)

Sam held her breath and Aadi tightly until he started to struggle against
her. She let him go. He scrambled into the corner and stared wide-eyed at the
door as a Jaffa on the other side shouted orders. There was a staff blast, and
another, and then the sound of footsteps receding down the next hallway.

Teal’c sank to his knees.

Sam crawled across the floor to him and gingerly pulled away the charred
edges of his jacket. It had been a glancing blow, but it wasn’t good. It was a
long way from good. She slapped the side of his face, first gently, and then
harder, until he opened his eyes. “We can’t stay here,” she whispered.

“I agree.”

“Can you walk?” The question was a courtesy. He had to walk, or they were
dead.

“I can.”

While she was helping him to his feet, a noise behind her drew her attention
and she craned her neck awkwardly to look. Up near the ceiling there was a
ventilation grate, hanging open on its hinges. Aadi’s feet were kicking and
wriggling, and then they disappeared inside with the rest of him. Teal’c braced
himself against the door, so Sam could hop up onto the packing crate Aadi had
used and peer into the narrow space. She couldn’t see a thing.

“Aadi!” she whispered and waited. Nothing. Damnit.

The shaft was a good size for an underfed thirteen-year-old boy, but there
was no way a grown woman and muscular, wounded adult man were also going to fit
in there.

She jumped down, sat on the crate and ran trembling hands through her hair.
Think.
Her brain obeyed, though as if playing in slow motion. Everything
seemed stretched and ungainly. When she looked up at Teal’c, he seemed far away
at the clear centre of a grey-edged circle.

“We could take the hallway,” Teal’c suggested, angling his head toward the
door Sam had disabled. “The Jaffa will not expect us to be behind them.”

She nodded. “And there’s got to be more stairs around here. Service entrance,
maybe.”

She gathered her strength and heaved herself to her feet, then went to lean
on the door next to him. One ear pressed to the door, she listened carefully.
Through the sound of Teal’c’s labored breathing she could make out the steady
pulsing of the alarm and a distant shout, but nothing else. There was no way to know if anyone stood guard
outside the door. She drew back her head at the sudden sound of footsteps,
coming from the small hallway and dwindling again in the direction of the
mezzanine. Maybe their luck was improving.

After checking Teal’c to make sure he was ready, she keyed the control and
stepped to the side as the door panel slid open. She checked the hall. It was
empty, except for a single Jaffa past the doorway at the far end. Sam crept
along the wall, pausing beside the fallen Jaffa to slide his knife out of his
boot. She left the
zat
in her waistband, not wanting to alert the guard
when she opened and charged the weapon. The knife was riskier but quieter.
Fortunately for her, the other Jaffa wasn’t wearing a helmet. She pulled herself
to her full height and balanced on the balls of her feet—he was a little
taller than she was—blew out a breath and lunged forward, circling his neck
with one arm. She yanked his head back and sliced her knife across his throat.
He slumped without a fight, and she lowered him to the ground, used his sleeve
to wipe the blood off of her blade before tucking the knife into her waistband
and nodding to Teal’c. He braced himself on the wall until he got to the
doorway, and she looped his arm over her shoulders.

“Geez,” she gasped, stepping around the dead Jaffa and into the dimness of
the hallway beyond. “All that muscle is really heavy.” He tried to pull away
from her at that, but she held him firmly. “Joking, Teal’c. You’re a—” She
grunted as she got a toe under her discarded jacket and flipped it up to catch
it with her free hand, grinning to feel the powerbar still in the pocket.
“You’re a featherweight.”

“I am not,” he contradicted her softly. She handed him the jacket and they
got moving again. She could feel the heat of his wound against her side, but he
made no sound of pain or protest.

The hallway wasn’t long—about thirty feet—and ended at an intersection.
At one end of the new corridor was yet another intersection, at the other a
doorway, a regular, human-type door. A left turn would take them deeper into the
complex, maybe toward the armory and their gear; a right turn would lead toward
the outside wall of the building—always provided her geography wasn’t too screwed up. Teal’c was already leaning right, so she let his momentum carry
them in that direction.

“Door will be guarded,” she said, as they eased along the hallway toward it.
Teal’c was getting heavier, his legs starting to buckle a little every couple of
steps. “Hang on, hang on, hang on,” she chanted under her breath.

This door opened onto a stairwell and another door at the bottom, pale light
showing through its grated window. Outside. She got Teal’c into the stairwell,
where he leaned on the railing, and turned back to pull the door shut behind
them.

She never saw the blow coming. It caught her on the side of her head and spun
her away from her assailant, so that she hit the floor on her hands and knees at
Teal’c’s feet. She heard the crackling, springing sound of a
zat
firing
and Teal’c’s grunt of pain. The current discharged along the railing in blue
arcs, and Teal’c tumbled after them, rolling heavily down the stairs and
colliding with the wall at the bottom.

With a snarl, Sam lashed out, getting her foot between the Jaffa’s legs.
Twisting her body, she used her leg like a lever and threw him off balance. She
only had time to register a blur of motion, then she was rolling, tangled in his
limbs, and crashing down the stairs with him.

The fall knocked the wind out of her, even with the Jaffa as padding, and she
lay on her back on top of him while the world whirled and canted and rocked back
into its regular upright geometry. When she was able to breathe again, she
craned her neck to look back up the stairs. There was no other pursuit, for now.
Getting her elbows under her, she pushed herself up and rolled over onto her
stomach. Nothing broken. Everything bruised.

The Jaffa was dead, his head twisted at an awkward angle.

“Teal’c,” she whispered and spat a bit of blood onto the floor. She’d done a
number on her tongue.

He’d hit the wall with his back, and, unlike the Jaffa guard, he wasn’t lying
akimbo. Everything seemed to be in its place. But he was out cold. Sam let her
head fall onto his shoulder as she shuddered in a breath and let it out slowly.

“Teal’c,” she said again, her mouth next to his ear. “Please, wake up. We’re not safe here.” She tried slapping him again, but with no luck.
“Please, Teal’c. I can’t lift you if you don’t help.” She managed to get to her
knees and then unsteadily to her feet. She got a hand under his armpit and one
on his arm and pulled. Getting him going was practically impossible. Her eyes
were tearing up from exhaustion and hurt and fear and it made her furious.
Heaving with all her might, she got him upright, stepped over his legs and
braced him from the other side with her knee while she grabbed him under both
arms and tried to drag him. He wouldn’t budge. Too many days without food or
water, and she was dizzy and too weak to pull him the stupid three feet to the
door. “Damnit, Teal’c!
Wake up!
The door’s right there! It’s
right
there
!”

She leaned away from his weight and pulled again, but her boots lost purchase
on the concrete floor and she fell, cracking her elbow hard enough to send
lightning up her arm. With a wince, she let out a hopeless little laugh. “You
know, in other circumstances, this would be kind of funny.” Except it wasn’t.

She sat up. Teal’c’s head was in her lap. She bowed as low over him as she
could and patted the side of his face. “Okay, okay,” she conceded. “We’ll take a
minute and regroup.” She pulled the
zat
out of her waistband, wincing at
the
zat
-shaped bruise against her spine, and put it on the floor beside
her. “Next escape, you are so carrying
me.”
Her ears were ringing and the
floor was rising and falling under her like a rolling sea. She rested her head
against the wall and thought of the Colonel and the look on his face when Daniel
had lifted his head, blood on his lips…

Daniel was grinning at her when she opened her eyes. But it wasn’t Daniel at
all. She reached out for the
zat.
A hand grabbed her wrist to stop her
and the face came closer, large, pale eyes peering at her through a curtain of
dark, curly hair.

“My brother says you’re worth something, Major Carter,” the woman said with a
faint twitching of the lips that might have been a skeptical smile. “I hope he’s
right.”

If there was one thing Jack tended to lack on missions, it was healthy
curiosity. He left that to Carter and Daniel, and spent his time worrying about other things. Like how to get out of a stroll into a
yawning dark hole with a Goa’uld literally breathing down his neck. This whole
adventure was taking on some ridiculously cliché overtones, the kind he was
going to mock like crazy if he lived to tell anyone about it. Now was the moment
he wanted to turn to Carter and ask her what she thought was down there and if
there were any weird energy readings, but he knew that answer already. His body
was telling him, via the slippery nausea and the creeping panic, that something
down there was Very Bad. As he stood there alone with Aris and Sebek, he had a
weird sensation of his limbs having been amputated: no Daniel, to bury his
clear-cut objectives in moral quandaries and fascinating cultural details; no
Teal’c, to exchange a knowing glance with; no Carter, to say, with respect, “I
don’t think so, sir” when he made a suggestion. No team, to order into position
as they set about exploring.

Aris Boch stood at Jack’s left elbow and stared into the darkness with him.
“We’ll need light,” he said, and glanced at Jack. “Don’t suppose you know how to
turn those on?”

“Sorry,” Jack said. “Can’t read the instructions.”

Behind him, Sebek huffed out a silent laugh, which raised the hair on Jack’s
neck again. “It is fortunate that you amuse us.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Fortunate.” He shifted the focus of his attention to
Aris, whose weapon was within grabbing distance. As if reading his intentions—and given the situation, it wasn’t hard -Aris drew the weapon and secured it in
his hand.

“Don’t try it,” he said softly. “I’d hate to have to kill you.”

“And leave you without a tour guide?” Jack said. He and Aris exchanged a
long, steady look. There wasn’t any way out but in.

“Provide light,” Sebek said.

“With what? Do you want me to glow?” Jack craned his neck to look over his
shoulder at Sebek. “Seriously—no idea here.”

“Then you may use your implements.” Sebek’s arm curved around Jack, holding
out Jack’s small flashlight. Jack took it from Sebek’s hand and swayed to the
left, away from that arm, bumping gently into Aris in the process. “And you
also, hunter,” Sebek said.

Jack clicked the light on, then off. “Okay,” he said. Sebek shoved him from behind, not quite hard enough to knock Jack off balance, but enough
for him to get the message.

Just past the threshold, the smell hit him: old, musty, like a stack of used
books. Whatever was in there had been closed up too long. The dry air whispered
past him like ghosts escaping as the pressure equalized. Jack squinted ahead and
switched the flash on. The blackness seemed to swallow up the light, giving no
comfort. Aris’ version of the flashlight was a stick that stuttered to life, a
soft blue, when he shook it, and it seemed to fare no better. Jack hesitated
until Sebek jabbed him between the shoulder blades with one of his gold-capped
fingers.

“Move forward!”

“Hey,” Jack said, in pointless protest. He switched off the light, let the
darkness press against him, close and cloying. “If you’re in such a hurry, by
all means, step right on by.”

“Do not try our patience, human.” The snake hung back in the doorway, framed
by the dim orange of guttering torches in the antechamber.

Aris fiddled with his stick until the blue flared brighter. “That’s better,”
he said, and charged past Jack as though he had no fear of what might await them
inside. Jack’s instincts were screaming a warning, but he felt no obligation to
give it to Aris. If Aris went down, it meant one less obstacle to overcome on
his way out.

“Come on,” Aris said, a disembodied voice in the dark.

Jack sighed and followed the sound and the intermittent wink of blue. He
could hear Sebek behind him, but didn’t bother to look.

A few paces in, he smacked into Aris, who was broad and unmoving in his path.
“What?” Jack said. Aris turned and pushed him aside.

“Step carefully,” Aris said. “There’s something strange about this place.”

“You just now figured that out?” Jack said. A low ambient glow rose in their
space, gathering intensity like a bulb on a dimmer switch until he could make
out shapes, and then distinct images. On either side of them, walls of solid
stone stretched to a low ceiling, rough-carved, perhaps two feet overhead—close enough for Jack to feel a little cramped. Aris was already stooping, even though he had
plenty of clearance. Each wall was covered with writing, floor to ceiling, the
same little picto-do-dads that had been etched on the vault door. Jack resisted
the urge to touch them. Probably not a good idea. The light extended about ten
feet ahead of them, and at its edge the engravings were interrupted by plain,
flat pillars that flanked the hall. If he squinted a little, Jack could see the
writing start up again on the far side of the pillars and fade into blackness.

“Look at this,” Aris said, striding to the edge of the illuminated section.
After a slight hesitation, the hallway ahead of him grew brighter. Another few
paces. The glow seemed to run ahead of him, beckoning. The corridor stretched
another thirty feet straight ahead, then forked into two, a right and left turn
at sharp angles.