06 - Siren Song (30 page)

Okay, armies could run on vengeance and bloodlust if not on principle, Sam
conceded with a barely suppressed sigh. They didn’t run
well,
but then
again, nothing went well here. “Right,” she said. “Maybe. But the trick here is
to not attract attention. You have to follow orders, lay low. Can you do that?”
Another round of nods that was less convincing than Sam had hoped.
One
problem at a time, Major,
the Colonel reminded her in her head.
Torch the
bridges when you get to them.
Turning to Hamel, she asked, “Where are our
weapons, Teal’c’s staff, the other
zat
we had when we escaped?”

In answer, Hamel pointed down the alleyway and took off at an ungainly trot,
the rest shuffling after him, bare feet slapping in puddles. Sam cast a last
look back at the house. Esa was in the doorway, his hand raised, maybe good
riddance, maybe goodbye.

They hadn’t gone far when Sam brushed her hand against Teal’c’s back and
waved him into the shadow of a doorway. She waited a beat while the extra set of footsteps came closer and then shot out
her arm and caught the passing shadow by the back of the shirt.

“You don’t listen, do you?” she whispered roughly.

Aadi twisted out of her grip. He backed himself up against the far wall of
the alley and planted his feet like he was expecting her to start dragging him
back to the house. Up ahead, Hamel and the others were waiting in the diluted
light of the lantern.

“You—” Aadi began.

Sam held up a hand and searched her memory for an angry mother voice. Coming
up empty, she settled for “annoyed military commander”. That, she had plenty of
examples to draw on. “Go home, Aadi.”

He thrust his chin out and didn’t move. After a second, though, he started to
fold a little and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Water ran down his face and off
the end of his chin. His skin was pearly blue-white with cold where it showed
above the ragged collar of his shirt. He wrapped his arms around himself and
looked up at her, his mouth pinched with the effort of not looking as scared as
he felt. “You want to kill my father?” he asked, through barely moving lips.

Sam blinked up into the rain. “No,” she answered wearily, as she allowed her
head to fall back against the corrugated steel of the wall behind her. “I don’t
want to kill your father, Aadi.”

“If he will listen to reason,” Teal’c said, “perhaps no one will have to
die.”

Sam lowered her eyes to meet Aadi’s. He watched her and Teal’c for a long
moment, but she couldn’t tell what was going on inside his head, and frankly, at
this point she didn’t have time to puzzle it out. “Go home,” she repeated and
pushed away from the wall, waving at Hamel to lead the way. She didn’t turn
around when Teal’c’s following footsteps were doubled by Aadi’s. “Go
home,
Aadi.” The footsteps continued. Finally, she stopped and faced him.

“I know the mine. And my father will listen to me. I’m not a—” He broke off
to search for the word. “A liability. At least I have two eyes,” he finished,
jabbing his finger at Behn, who offered no contradiction. When Sam looked skeptically at him, he pointed over his shoulder,
adding, “I could go now to the mine, meet you there.”

“Fine,” Sam sighed, but she pinned Hamel with a stare. “He’s your
responsibility.” Then, to Teal’c, “No weapon.” Teal’c nodded and she was glad
that Teal’c, at least, followed her orders, even if she got worn down by a
thirteen-year-old. “Let’s go get the Colonel, okay?” she mumbled as they got
underway again. Let
him
deal with the kids.

“You know what?” Jack told no one in particular. “I really, really hate this
place.” He sat in the middle of the passageway and pressed the heel of his good
hand to his brow, trying to blunt the point of the ice pick behind his eye that
was boring through his skull from the inside. He didn’t close his eyes, though,
partly because he wanted to keep Aris and Sebek in sight, but mostly because
there were tendrils of… something—visuals, maybe, only more than that—still trailing and twisting through his brain like the tentacles of some giant
passing jellyfish, each with a sting on the end.

Whatever had happened to him, Sebek had recovered fast, way faster than Jack
had, and was crouching in front of him, hands hanging loosely over his knees.
His eyes were narrowed and his mouth was curled up in a thin smile.

“What?” Jack demanded testily. That smile was irritating and the clearness in
Sebek’s eyes, compared to the Weariness Jack felt, was insulting. Of course,
Sebek hadn’t actually touched the wall and he hadn’t felt his brainpan splitting
to let… stuff… freaky stuff… in, and he hadn’t been ribboned six ways from
Sunday, either.

“What did you see?” Sebek asked him. He raised his eyebrows like Daniel used
to when asking that kind of question.

“I didn’t see anything,” he lied.
Screw you, Sebek,
he thought. He
could still feel the prickle of intense heat, like a blast furnace against his
face, and when he blinked, the after-image of a bare, stony plateau and two
rising suns glowed behind his lids. One sun was swollen and red, the other tiny
and blue. He tried to remember the designation of that planet, but nothing came
to mind. He was beginning to think he’d never been there before.

But he
felt
like he’d been there. He could
feel
the thinness of
the air as it rasped through his lungs, gritty with dust. The cracked sandstone
was too hot to touch, and his palms itched, the pads of his fingertips burning.
His hands. Why had he been on his
hands?

Dropping the one from his forehead to look at it, he was momentarily
surprised to see four naked fingers and a thumb instead of… what? Webs. Three
scaly, webbed toes. And feathers.

“What the hell?” he breathed and resisted the urge to screw his fists into
his eye sockets.

Sebek’s smile was wider now and he nodded slowly. “You did see something.”

“Maybe. But I see lots of stuff. It’s a side effect of being half-starved and
sleep-deprived and, oh, maybe, being
shot in the back
every five
minutes.”

Jack could still feel the percussion of the energy bolt from Sebek’s ribbon
device, like an enormous, knuckled fist slamming between his shoulder blades. He
focused on that. It was better than the lingering feeling that he was a
feathered quadruped, and it made him angrier and more alert, instead of a little
on the loopy side.

“We would not have to punish you if you were compliant. Whatever you suffer
is your own doing. For instance, in this case.” He aimed the ribbon device at
Jack’s forehead. “You can tell us what you saw, or we can cause you great pain.
And, we should tell you that your friend finds your pain very distressing.”
Sebek tapped his own temple with his empty hand. The crystal in the other glowed
livid, causing ah anticipating flare in Jack’s head.

Instead of answering, Jack lunged forward, which wasn’t easy from his
position sprawled on the floor, but he managed to get enough momentum behind it
to throw Sebek onto his back. Jack scrambled on top of him and grabbed the arm
with the ribbon device, barely feeling it when he brought the hand—and his own
broken one—down hard onto the stone. He wasn’t thinking of much except
breaking that damn crystal, but Sebek was strong, stronger than Daniel had ever
been in sparring, and Jack couldn’t twist his wrist enough to get the hand
turned over so that the next blow would smash the crystal against the floor.

But he didn’t have the time, either, because Aris was on him, an arm like a
tree trunk across Jack’s windpipe pulling him up onto his knees and away from
Sebek, squeezing off the breath Jack needed to shout the curse that was lodged
in his throat.

As his vision was narrowing and going grey at the edges and Sebek was rising
and leaning into the shrinking centre of clarity, Jack blinked. It wasn’t
Sebek’s eyes on him anymore, but mirrors half the size of his palm, eye-shaped
in a delicate face of iridescent glass, his reflection floating, distorted by
the curvature, at the center of each mirror. Beneath the small, underdeveloped
nose, the mouth opened to show a tongue shockingly pink against the bloodless
white of the lips, and a thin, high voice seemed to tumble like water over him,
soothing, soothing, the only thing left to hang on to as the world started to go
black. It flowed through his grasping fingers.

Tell him,
the hallucination said to him, gently.
He will hurt you if
you don’t tell him. It is a small thing, but the reward is great.

Jack pressed his lips together against the words that leaped up into his
mouth.

Give this little bit, and I will give you everything.

The voice was so sweet, and under the cajoling words were others.
Give up,
give up, give up.

Jack meant to say, “No,” but what came out was, “A desert.” The words were
crushed by the weight of Aris’ arm on his throat.

“What did you say?” Sebek asked, and there was a shadow of motion that Jack
figured was Sebek waving Aris off.

The pressure on his throat lessened a little, enough for him to talk. Inside
his head, the sweet voice crooned
give up, give up, give up
and Jack
thought,
Screw you,
but his mouth was in full rebellion and was saying,
“It was a desert. I saw my feet. My hands. Or maybe feet. Whatever. There were
feathers.”

Behind him, Aris let out a snort of laughter.

“Hey,” Jack said, “you asked. Don’t blame me if it sounds stupid.”

Inside his head, the voice was gone, and he felt inconsolably lonely, which
was surely a sign of the incipient crazies.

Sebek was standing now, looking down at him with an expression of mild
irritation as he rubbed his wrist and settled the ribbon device back into a
comfortable position. “You will not touch us again,” he ordered.

Without waiting for Jack’s pithy and cutting retort, Sebek turned to the wall and ran the gold-capped hand across its surface. Nothing
happened. But when he raised his empty hand, the wall came to life under his
almost touch. With the other hand, Sebek flicked his fingers at Aris, and Jack
found himself suddenly on his feet, Aris’ fist bunched up in the shoulder of
Jack’s jacket to hold him upright until Jack got his boots fiat on the floor.

“Why do you think you saw this place, the desert, the feathers?” Sebek asked
him, slowly moving his hand across the tiles of glyphs and watching the color
flare and follow the motion of his hand.

Jack shrugged.

Sebek paused over a tile at Jack’s shoulder level. “It was this one, I
think.”

Jack shrugged again. The floor was sort of corkscrewing up-down, left-right,
and he was sure that if he could look in the mirror, he’d see the ice pick in
his skull stabbing out through his left eye. He didn’t want to think about
mirrors. He wanted to lie down and sleep until doomsday. But, seeing how things
were going, that might not be such a long nap.

While he was having these cheering thoughts, Sebek snagged him by the cuff of
his sleeve and lifted his arm. Before he could react, the Goa’uld closed his
fingers around Jack’s hand, squeezing him with bone-crushing strength, and
pressed Jack’s fingertips against the wall, sliding his fingers sideways over
the rough symbols.

This time it wasn’t desert. It was water. He surged upward through shafts of
light, breached the surface with a shriek of escaping air, a shudder in his
guts, and a wheeze as a new breath filled him. The sky overhead was one swirling
nebula, purple winding around a green center. His jaws gaped open as his spine
arched, impossibly supple, and he slid backward again into blackness. But before
he did, he caught sight of something else, poised like him between sea and sky,
a massive bullet-shaped head, a maw full of teeth, a single glassy eye, the
sinuous flip of a tail, and he thought, clearly, although in no language he’d
ever heard:
love.

Jack lurched backward as Sebek released him. He put his hands over his eyes,
surprised to find them open. When he hit the opposite wall of the passageway with his shoulder, he could see the flare of light
between his fingers—glyphs like animals dancing in stone, lit up from the
inside—and then the ocean was gone and he was floating against the stars,
weightless, and below him was a slowly turning space station, eight rings on a
central spindle. Beyond it was a planet wrapped in bands of red and yellow. As
he watched, a gun turret at the stationary center of the array swiveled toward
him, glowing, firing silently.

Then he was on his knees beside Sebek, his forehead on Aris’ boot. The bit
of food he’d eaten was making a comeback. He didn’t bother to turn his head.
With a grunt of disgust, Aris kicked him away, then took a step forward to wipe
his toe on Jack’s pant leg.

“Nice,” Aris said, grimacing.

“Blame your boss,” Jack answered, slowly dragging himself to his feet. He
almost reached out to steady himself, but caught himself in time and instead
pressed three fingers against his throbbing eye. He waited until Sebek, who also
seemed to have fallen to one knee, raised his head, and then Jack said, “That
was
unpleasant
.”

“Sorry, Jack,” Sebek said, in Daniel’s voice, lifting his hand to ward off an
expected blow. “I know, you said you didn’t want to hear my voice again. But
it’s not like I can help it.”

A familiar, humorless grin flitted across his face. Daniel had used that grin
a lot before he’d ascended, in those last months when he’d been weighed down by
doubt. It was the smile he’d used when he’d sat across from Jack in the
infirmary and described the effects of terminal radiation poisoning. Ironic,
resigned, impotent. Jack had seen that smile every time he closed his eyes for
months after. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to kill Sebek for using it.