06 - Siren Song (27 page)

As if hearing her body’s protests, Hamel craned his neck to look at her, then
rose and weaved his way around the gathered bodies. With a sigh, he dropped to
the floor beside her. He leaned his balding head back against the brick and
closed his eyes. His lean face was slack with exhaustion and deeply shadowed in
the shifting light. Sam couldn’t tell how old he was; he moved like an old man, but a life of hard labor could have aged him well beyond his years. She
thought of her father and couldn’t help wondering if Jacob knew she was missing.

Teal’c didn’t bother to hide the appraisal in his eyes as he studied Hamel,
the senior member of their army. Sam wanted to think of Hamel as the older man,
but it was unlikely any of these people were older than Teal’c. She watched him
tilt his head attentively toward Hamel and realized that maybe the years would
start to weigh on him like they did on the rest of them, now that he didn’t have
a symbiote to slow his aging process. Unless his genetic makeup was sufficiently
modified for longevity—but that seemed a little too generous on the part of
the Goa’uld. She thought of Apophis and his host dying in the SGC, thousands of
years catching up with the body in hours. Teal’c looked the same as he always
did. What did a century of life feel like? Hamel looked like he’d know.

“To whom do you pray?” Teal’c asked him.

Hamel offered a wry smile while he considered the question. “Don’t worry. Not
to that worm, Sebek.” He made a small, sharp gesture with his fingers as if he
were squashing a bug. The men within earshot did the same. “No, we remember the
Nitori. Give thanks.”

Teal’c regarded him in silence for a moment, then said, “You have little to
give thanks for.”

This time, the smile became a low chuckle. “We have this world. It’s not all
ugly, you know.” He waved his hand vaguely toward some distant place. Sam
wondered if he’d ever seen it himself, and if he ever would. “We have today.
Maybe, if things go our way, we even have tomorrow.” He eyed Teal’c a little
critically. “You were a slave. You should know what a gift that is.”

“I have since learned to hope for more.”

“Well,” Hamel said, pulling his scrawny legs up inside his shirt, “maybe you
can teach us that, too.”

Sam leaned forward and looped her arms over her knees. “We have to get
moving. It’s already been too long. How many of your people can you count on?”

It took longer for Hamel to calculate his answer than the final sum seemed to warrant. “Me. Aadi. One or two others here and maybe a few more
in the mine.” When Sam sighed and dropped her head for a moment onto her arms,
he added, “And more, if Brenneka can be convinced.”

“How many more?”

“Hard to say for sure, but maybe a hundred, if word spreads.
If
Brenneka can be convinced,” he repeated, although he didn’t look too optimistic.

Sam’s frustration came out in her voice, and she had to remind herself to
speak softly. “This is what I don’t get. She talks about standing up to the
Goa’uld, but she won’t help us do that. We have a better chance together than
apart.”

Hamel picked at the tiles with broken nails. “She believes her brother will
take care of Sebek, bring back the gift the Nitori left us. She won’t act until
she knows that she can win. She doesn’t want our victory to be tainted by the
interference of offworlders.” He flicked a bit of grout from his fingers and
watched Brenneka gathering the bowls, stopping as she did to speak to each man
still hunkered down on the floor. One by one they nodded and made that gesture
again, a bird escaping. Aadi followed close behind, taking the bowls from her
and carrying them in a wobbling stack he kept upright by bracing it with his
chin. When she passed to the far end of the room, Hamel went on. “She and others
in the Order believe that the Nitori will come back to us when we are worthy of
their attention. This is a test of our will and our faith.”

Teal’c met Sam’s eyes. She answered his unvoiced question with a shake of her
head, and his mouth thinned to a disapproving line.

“Do you believe that?” Sam asked.

In his lap, Hamel’s hands made the reverential gesture. “I’m a pragmatist,”
he answered at last. “I’m not above inviting a friendly god to supper.
Especially if he’s bringing the food. But I’m not going to sit and starve while
I wait.” He shrugged. “It’s not much of a faith, but it’s better than no faith
at all.” His grin showed a mouthful of blackened teeth. “Some pray and wait for
grace. I say, pray while you’re running, meet the god on the road.”

Sam had to agree, but Hamel didn’t look like he was up for much running. “What would convince her?” she asked with a nod toward Brenneka, who
was now in conference with Esa by the door.

“A sky full of Nitori, each one bringing a whirlwind and lightning.”

The rain intensified and hissed against the tarp and the cobblestones
outside. No lightning, though. Sam considered their options, making sure to
avoid Teal’c’s eyes. She knew what his response would be. With a curt nod to
herself, she walked her hands up the wall until she was upright and steady, then
stepped over the sprawled men, carefully making her way toward Brenneka. They
needed more than an old man and a kid. They could probably sneak into the mine
with a small party. But if it came down to a fight, they needed Brenneka’s army
of believers.

Brenneka nodded at her approach and said, “Esa has returned from the mine.
Sebek and your friend and my brother have entered the vault. But the Jaffa were
prevented from entering with them.” She did Sam the favor of not smiling, but
her pale eyes glittered with anticipated triumph. “It won’t be long now.”

“Until Aris kills Daniel,” Sam finished for her. It was impossible for her to
keep her voice down now.

“Until he kills Sebek. Your friend is already dead.”

“We know that’s not true. We know the host survives. If we go now, if you
help us, we can stop this. We can stop Sebek, and we can get to whatever’s
hidden in that mountain. We can do it together.”

“And you will take the gift and keep it for yourselves.”

“No.
No.”
Sam counted to five, mastering her temper. It was time to
do
something. It could already be too late. There was no way the Colonel
would let Aris do that to Daniel. No way. The thought of the Colonel having to
kill Daniel himself with nobody there to share the burden of it made her brain
white out with static. This time she had to count all the way to ten before she
had her frustration tamped down again. Firmly, but calmly, she met Brenneka’s
eyes with all the sincerity she could muster. “That’s not how it works. It’s not
how
we
work. Please, Brenneka.”

The small woman shook her head brusquely and tried to push past her.

“I’ve seen the Nitori,” Sam blurted. “Your gods.”

That worked. Brenneka stopped and turned slowly to look at her. In fact,
everyone in the room was looking at her. Including Teal’c, who didn’t look happy
at all.

Brenneka’s expression didn’t change. She watched Sam suspiciously, her arms
wrapped around her body as though she’d suddenly gotten colder. “You said you
didn’t know the Nitori.”

“Well, not as Nitori, no. We call them the Ancients.” Sucking in a bracing
breath, Sam kept her eyes on Brenneka’s. On the other side of the room, Teal’c
was on his feet. “And Daniel’s one of them.”

It took a long time for Brenneka to decide what to do with her face. She
settled on indignation.
“We
are the people of the Nitori,” she hissed.

Behind her, the room was starting to buzz, the sprawled men sitting up and
whispering to each other. That curse made a ripple through the room, but Sam
noticed that not all of the men took it up.

“Yes, of course you are,” Sam answered, letting her gaze slip significantly
to the crowd before meeting Brenneka’s again. “But it’s a big universe, and the
Nitori got around. You aren’t the only ones, Brenneka.” She pointed behind her
in the general direction of the mine. “And if you let Aris kill Daniel, you’ll
be killing—”

“Major Carter,” Teal’c interrupted from the far side of the room, but Sam
aimed a warning look at him and hurried on.

“You said that you were taught how to build the ships by someone… the
Inspired. And that person was absorbed by the Nitori.”

Another flutter of voices in the room, heads bowing briefly over clasped
hands.

“It was a gift,” Brenneka said, her voice hard, but brittle.

“Well, that same thing happened to Daniel. They call it ascension.” Struck by
a realization, Sam came forward and started to move the gathered people aside,
ushering and urging them toward the edges of the room until there was an open
space of floor, only Brenneka still standing there alone amid the swirling
colors of the broken tile mosaic. Sam pointed at their feet. It wasn’t an image
of waves like she’d first thought. “See? I know this.” With her toe, she traced
the tendrils of white on their background of blue. “This is the Nitori. This is what Daniel looked like when he left us.” Her voice catching on the last
words, she blinked back sudden tears. God, she was tired. “And you said there
was a cache of knowledge that was left and the Inspired took it all in. That’s
what happened to the Colonel, years ago. He learned all that the Ancients, the
Nitori, knew. He learned enough to go to another
galaxy
.”

Holding up both hands, Brenneka turned her head away as though from the
burning heat of a house fire. Around them, the kinsmen were silent and perfectly
still.

Sam pressed on. “There was a device at a special meeting place. It reached
out and grabbed the Colonel by the head and there were lights—”

“And the Nitori enfolded him, and the lights filled him and when he spoke the
world changed—” It was Hamel, coming forward, nodding.

“—and the people changed and—” another man said, his voice wavering, fearful,
faltering before another picked up the almost-song.

“—the universe opened like a flower and—”

“—the people were like seeds blowing in the dark sky—”

“You lie,” Brenneka said flatly, with the same common sense conviction she’d
use to say that the rain was falling.

“Why do you think Sebek wanted Daniel, specifically Daniel? There are lots of
people in this galaxy who could eventually crack that message on the door. It’s
because of what Daniel wa—What Daniel is, what the Colonel is. What they know.”
Sam was right next to Brenneka now, using her greater height, looming over the
woman. Her back was prickling with the intensity of the attention on her, and
her gut was twisting with distaste for what she was about to do. “If you let
Daniel and the Colonel die, you’ll be killing the closest link you have to your
gods. How worthy will you be then?”

When she glanced over Brenneka’s head, she found Teal’c on the edge of the
crowd, and his face was stone.

Daniel was beginning to understand: isolate the pathways, sneak through the
nervous system into the framework of his body as if it were a spider’s web of conduits, and find the place where action was needed.
This was why, for the past half hour, he’d been twitching his little finger. Not
much, just a fraction of an inch. Barely any energy was required to make the
connections, and Sebek was preoccupied with the maze and the path they were
walking.

So far, Sebek hadn’t noticed.

His finger twitched, twitched, and Daniel curled up at the back of his own
body, waiting for another chance to drive. Now that he knew he could do it, he
only had to wait for the chance to shift forward and exert control.

Everything was trial and error, experiments performed on a wisp of hope that
Sebek wouldn’t discover his intentions and turn on him. The torture Sebek
inflicted on him for failure to comply was like acid in his brain, seeping
through his thoughts and shorting him out, until Daniel wasn’t a coherent
presence anymore. When Sebek punished him, Daniel became a mass of disorganized
impulses, misfiring. He knew that sensation, a weightless fear, as if he were
falling up, uncontained by gravity.

He was getting the hang of drawing a curtain between his memories and Sebek’s
insistent probes. As long as Sebek didn’t seek specific information, Daniel
could keep his thoughts neutral, shrunk down like blips on the radar, appearing
and disappearing before Sebek could be distracted into paying attention to them.

Twitch, twitch. The hand his finger was attached to began to tremble, the
muscles spasming—not his doing, not his control. He felt the weakness seize
his body and shake it, throwing Sebek back and Daniel forward, and he gasped,
unprepared for the sensation of boundaries collapsing. All he needed was a few
more minutes, and he would find a way to convince Jack. There had to be a way,
but he didn’t dare think about it too closely, for fear Sebek would steal any
workable idea from him and use it to trick Jack. Sebek pressed, twisted inside
him, and Daniel retreated ahead of the wave of mind-shattering fire. This time,
when he gasped, it wasn’t audible.

The barriers between them were beginning to fall and rise without warning,
like a wave cresting, then collapsing back down to the dark water, only to
repeat again moments later. If only he could figure out how to be on top of the wave. He
had
to get himself in
position to seize the chances. Sebek was weakening; Daniel was sure of it now.
The Goa’uld’s control of Daniel was taking all Daniel’s strength, and the aching
palsy of his muscles was only a symptom of it. His eyesight was getting worse in
increments large enough for Daniel to perceive, like the changing of a lens over
his eye. He knew, though he wasn’t sure how, that Sebek could not heal his eyes.
He needed his glasses, but they’d come too far to go back for them now—another
thing Daniel could use to his advantage, provided he wasn’t blind by the time he
had a chance to strike.