06 - Siren Song (39 page)

It was like a sudden connection, a radio finally tuned to the proper channel,
and all at once the disconnected parts of his brain were speaking to each other.
Lorelei. He’d been thinking of her for a long time, he realized, through all the
winding corridors, that irresistible cord twisted in his chest and pulling him
forward, onward. Thinking of siren songs, of mermaids and sailors pulled to
their deaths by compulsion, irresistible impulse.

Lorelei.
It wasn’t her name at all, just a thought he’d had, a comparison
his mind had made. She had taken this from him, directly from his mind, and he
hadn’t even known.

The maze was a treasure, more information here than he could imagine in one
place. He couldn’t open his eyes wide enough to take it in, couldn’t even make a
space big enough in his head to accommodate the idea of it: the memories, the
feelings
of who knew how many species, how far flung, how advanced. Wonders, she’d said. Yes. It was
wonderful. Sebek practically slavered at the thought of what he could grasp
here, what he could use. His thoughts were purpled with the rhetoric of
aggrandizement, nothing but golden thrones, vast Jaffa armies kneeling, the
populations of whole planets bowing and laying their riches at his feet, System
Lords abased and begging.

But then, there was this cord, twisted, taut, and it was different from lust
for knowledge or power. It wasn’t lust
for
anything so simple. It was yearning,
pure like a single voice singing a perfect note, a sound that made everything in
him vibrate in sympathy. He
wanted
so hard that he could feel it like a
fist under his ribs, like anguish, and his hands opened and closed around
nothing, and all he could do was go forward, forward, and Sebek’s plans for
dominating the galaxy and his own longing to
know
were pale reflections
of that wanting, like a myna bird reciting Shakespeare, like humans singing the
songs of angels.

And he looked down, saw himself in her eyes, distorted, smaller and broken
and alone, and he wanted nothing but to fall, to give. Anything to take him
closer. Her touch burned his skin with cold.

Lorelei.
His brain had been trying to tell him for hours, days maybe.
Lorelei sat on the rocks on the Rhine, and she sang a song of longing, and the
sailors drowned in it.

“Lorelei,” she said, plucking the name from his mind.

He was drowning.

But now he knew it.

“What?” he said, drawing away from her.

Immediately, the character of the light in the chamber changed, dimming to
ruddy, pulsing threads spidering across the walls, writhing with sinuous motion.
He could feel it on his skin.

The compassion in her face was gone, but she tried to keep it in her voice.
“Shhhh,” she said, leaning closer, following him as he backpedaled away from
her. “It’s such a small thing.” Her fingers fluttered in his peripheral vision,
one hand at each temple. So cold. “It’s such a small thing, this bit I took. And
I will give you everything. You want to see. I will help you.” When he
sidestepped her, circled around Aris to stand by Jack, she hunched her shoulders and turned in
place, following him like a bird or a reptile, something predatory. The light
traced itself across her body, was fractured against her scales, multiplied, and
flung outward again, and Daniel could feel each flake like it was shrapnel, a
thousand ghostly cuts.

“I’m
hungry,”
she said coldly, her voice deepening. “And it is such a
small thing.”

Jack stepped between them. Momentary jealousy and anger stabbed through
Daniel as Jack blocked her from view. He knew Jack was yearning for her just as
Daniel was, but his hands were closed into tight fists, even the broken one with
its bandaged finger angled outward, and his neck was stiff, unbending.

“If it’s such a small thing, then you could’ve done without it,” Jack said to
Lorelei. “How ’bout you tell us why the Ancients locked you up in here.”

“They were unjust and afraid.”

Daniel nodded. “Because… why? Why do you do this, bring us here?”

“I am what I am.”

“And what’s that?” Jack demanded, holding out his arm to keep Daniel from
getting closer to her.

“A repository of knowledge,” Daniel said as the realization took shape in his
head. He had to grope for it, though, and he felt like he was abandoning his
best friend. She looked stricken, betrayed, and he almost gave up, but Jack’s
elbow pressed into his stomach and Daniel frowned, dragging his convictions into
the light. “She gathers. She records. She
takes.”
He thought of all the
glowing panels in the maze, thousands of them, memories gathered, recorded.
“What happened to them? The beings you gathered from?”

Before she could answer, Aris came up on the other side of her. “I’ll give,”
he said. “Show me the weapons, like those others, the ones on that satellite,
how to find them. I’ll give you anything you want.”

She kept looking at Daniel and Jack. Although her face didn’t change and her
head didn’t move, Daniel could feel her focus shifting from one to the other of
them, because each time her attention drew away from him, the ache flared up in his chest, and the loneliness
leeched into him like ice water seeping under his skin. She might be taking
anything, and he couldn’t see it and couldn’t stop her.

“You have nothing I need,” she told Aris.

Even in the erratic light, Daniel could see Aris shaking with sudden rage. “I
brought them here. Me. I brought them and I deserve something.” He jabbed the
air above his head viciously with one finger. “Do you know what’s going on up
there? I’m not leaving without something.”

“Then bring them a little further,” she demanded. She raised her hand and
pointed at Daniel and Jack. “Them. There is so much there.” She twitched her
head to the side, again, like a bird, and Daniel was transfixed by the
reflection of Jack’s set features in her eyes. “In them are the memories of
generations. In them is the knowledge of vast beings, these Ancients, these
others, the serpents. These things are worthy gifts.”

“Yeah, not going to happen,” Jack said.

He leaned backward against Daniel, shoving him toward the door, and Daniel
knew he was thinking mostly about keeping Daniel’s knowledge away from her. Even
so, the cold of loneliness and jealousy in his skin warmed under that protective
gesture. But Sebek strained against it. Keen pain slivered its way through
Daniel. He opened his mouth to say something to Jack, an apology maybe—as if
there were anything that could cover this, the sick irony of Jack being forced
to protect what he hated—but Sebek exerted enough control to grind Daniel’s
teeth together, and to add a sharp jab and twist to the sliver for good measure.

“Bring me out of this place. Bring me out. Bring me out there.” Lorelei
advanced on them, but Jack held his ground.

“I said no.”

“I can compel you,” she said, her feral smile a promise.

The light was pounding now, like the worst migraine Daniel had ever had, and
the red threads writhed along the walls, and the floor seemed to lurch and sway
and the color was as loud as her voice, became her voice, the same words winding
and jerking, splitting, doubling back on themselves, alive. They hissed and wailed in Daniel’s head,
around and around, echoes chasing echoes until he had to put his hands over his
ears, and still he heard it, insistent, inescapable. Inside his mind, he ran.

“Yes,”
Sebek said. “Yes.” And Daniel could only watch as his own hand
closed around Jack’s wrist, yanked hard and twisted his arm behind his back. He
felt Sebek’s quick, hot flash of triumph as Jack crashed to his knees, and
Lorelei laid her hand on Jack’s head.

Daniel couldn’t cover his ears when Jack screamed.

The ground heaved under her feet, and Sam dropped a crystal. Another
explosion topside. She hunched her shoulders against the sand and small stones
that pattered down around her, took the crystal from Teal’c without looking at
him, and slotted it into place.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she repeated in a whisper, breathing dust. It was more
than she could stand, the need to go faster, the need to get in there, the
need… pure need. It yawned open inside her, bottomless, cold, so
physical
that one hand folded into a fist at her breast as if she could grab that
need, hold onto it, and keep it from expanding, from swallowing her. Her whisper
turned to a wordless panting. She knew that there was something… something on
the other side of the force field that she needed to find, someone, but that
concern was barely a pinprick of light in the vastness of wanting. Sam forced
her hand back into motion and used it to realign the crystals inside the Ancient
panel. Someone was crying, a pitiful wail of need and longing. It could have
been her. She couldn’t tell.

Sam barely registered the sound of staff fire behind her, but she knew when
Teal’c left her side and stood at her back—his shadow fell across the panel
and she had to lean in closer so she could see. She vaguely heard him shouting
orders. The wall a few feet to her right exploded in a cloud of vaporized stone.
Sam shielded the panel with her body while heat and shrapnel peppered her back.
Another shot, to the left, this one connecting with the force field. The flare
of light blinded her.

She kept working by touch alone.

A second shot to the field and now seething static crawled across her skin. A
third. The crystals under her fingers were hot. When her vision recovered, she
could see them as floating blocks of color. Blue, green, white, red. The
crystals flickered, went out, flashed on again, all white.

Behind her, someone’s shout was sliced off abruptly. Another began, furious,
raw-voiced, and it joined with the crying in her head, louder and louder, until
it threatened to crack her apart and she had to open her mouth to let it out.

The ground shook again. She staggered, put out a hand to steady herself, and
connected with the shield. Sam let out a screech as her arm passed through.
Searing pain, as though she’d been flayed.

Sam sat on the shuddering floor and looked at the arm. It was blue to the
elbow where a sparkling line circled her flesh. For a second, before the shield
steadied, she had seen each of her bones glowing white through her skin. When
she’d tried to pull herself out, she’d almost passed out from the pain. With a
deep breath, she got her feet under her and stood, dragging her arm up with her.
It was like sliding through blades of glass, but there was no blood.

Gouts of dirt erupted from the ground as another blast hit near the base of
the shield. The rocks and sand shot through the flickering barrier like
fireworks, tumbling across the stone floor on the other side, and each grain
sent out a ripple of light like a knife stabbing through her. One direct hit
from a staff against the shield and… well, she didn’t even want to imagine it.

Teal’c was down on one knee, steadily firing his staff up the ramp toward the
access tunnel. There was no cover for him, but he was unharmed so far. Aadi and
Brenneka were on either side of the ramp, flattened against the wall. Brenneka
darted out and got off a wild shot, then threw herself back to escape an
answering blast from the top of the ramp. Hamel was lying face-down in the
middle of the floor.

The whole vault chamber was full of choking dust so that every staff blast
and
zat
discharge seemed to expand outward in a halo of soft-edged light.
In the haze, it appeared to Sam as though everything were moving in slow motion,
dreamily. She watched a bolt of heated plasma slice through the air from the ramp to the wall right beside
the shield panel, and the sparks rained out like music, danced on the floor
around Teal’c’s kneeling form, and died. The shield pulsed. Along its surface
she could see the deadly wave of distortion coming toward her.

She lunged to the side, forced herself through the resistant shield with a
shout that was part battle cry, part scream of pain. She was being torn apart in
layers—skin, muscle, bone—and when she hit the ground on her shoulder and
skidded through the gritty debris on the other side, she was numb, stripped of
nerves.

It took too many precious seconds to find her limbs again and to get them to
cooperate with each other so that she could crawl back toward the barrier.
Through the shimmering light, she could see Hamel stirring, drawing his knees up
under him, groping for his
zat.
The side of his face was blackened. Aadi
was still crouched low in the corner where the ramp met the wall, and he was
pointing at her.

Teal’c and Brenneka turned as one.

Sam saw Brenneka’s mouth open—“Go!”—before Brenneka spun away, rising
from her shelter, staff coming up, laying down cover fire.

Following her example, Aadi sneaked the
zat
up above the edge of the
ramp and fired blindly. Hamel half-crawled across the foot of the ramp and
rolled off of it into shelter beside Aadi.

Teal’c hesitated for a moment, but it felt like hours to Sam, who watched
from the other side of the barrier, still caught in the adrenaline-rush and the
memory of pain that distended time and twisted space. But it was more than that,
too. It was taking too long to move forward. She had to move forward. Even the
fire in her skin couldn’t warm the icy desire in her chest.
Hurry, hurry,
hurry.

Once he was moving, Teal’c wasted no time. He flung himself at the barrier,
passing through in a corona of intense blue light. Sam held up her hand against
it, the bones of her fingers ghostly in blue skin. He tumbled past her and
landed in a panting heap, but he was down only for a second before he heaved
himself onto his knees and raised his head to look back at the vault chamber.

It was quiet on their side of the barrier, no sound at all except the rasp of
their breathing and, from somewhere far away, a child crying. On the other side
of the shield the battle raged on silently. Staff blasts gouged holes in the
stone floor.
Zat
fire crackled through dust-filled air. Another shot hit
the shield. Sam saw it coming and flattened herself, arms around her head.
Teal’c did the same, throwing his body over hers. The passing light scoured
them. Teal’c didn’t shout out loud, but she could feel it shuddering through
him.