06 - Siren Song (40 page)

When they raised their heads, the shield was flickering. It rippled once, and
again, then disappeared for a second before flaring back to life. A distant part
of Sam’s brain hoped that, by the time they’d made their way back with the
Colonel and Daniel, the shield would have fallen completely. But that was a
distant part of her brain. Most of her didn’t want to consider the idea of
leaving. Only going forward. Only that.

She was turning away from the barrier when she caught sight of Hamel,
lurching up from cover, one foot on the ramp. His
zat
was gone. A Jaffa
was standing over him, eyes gleaming red above the cruelly smiling crocodile’s
snout of his helmet. The staff weapon was angled down at Hamel’s head. It
crackled, ready to fire. But before it could, Brenneka leaped out from the other
side of the ramp, swung her staff in a low arc and connected with the Jaffa’s
legs. Someone with Teal’c’s bulk and power might have been able to sweep the
Jaffa onto his back, but Brenneka wasn’t Teal’c. The staff snapped out of her
hands and spun away with enough momentum to bring it to the edge of the shield.
The Jaffa planted the heel of his staff on the ground, twisted with more grace
than should be possible in his heavy armor, and caught Brenneka by the throat.
She kicked at him as he lifted her off her feet. Behind him, Aadi was
straightening, arms stiff,
zat
aimed. The Jaffa jerked Brenneka sharply,
twisting his wrist, and her head lolled back, eyes open, as her body went as
limp as rags.

Aadi was screaming something as he fired.

“No.” Sam took a step toward the barrier but was brought up short by Teal’c’s
strong grip on her arm. “Aadi!” she shouted and waved him toward the vault. He
didn’t turn to her or stop firing.

When she stepped forward and touched the field, she let out a yelp as pain
sizzled up her arm into her neck. For now, there was no going back through the
shield.

“They cannot hear,” Teal’c said. The ground heaved again, and rubble crashed
silently beyond the tunnel mouth, belching a new cloud of black dust. “The
tunnels are unstable. We must go on if we are to find the Colonel and Daniel
Jackson.”

Hamel picked up the fallen Jaffa’s staff and fired over and over up the ramp,
Aadi at his side. The dim shape of a Jaffa stumbled away from the rock fall and
was caught by Aadi’s
zat.

“We must go,” Teal’c repeated with a tug on her arm.

Sam pulled the sleeve of her jacket down over her hand and swiped tears and
sweat from her stinging eyes. She nodded and turned to face the hallway behind
them.

The erratic light of the failing shield lit their way to the first fork in
the path. Sam stood at the crossroads where the two new hallways diverged and
peered first down one, then down the other. They looked identical. Narrow,
low-ceilinged. The walls were covered with the same glyphs as the vault door,
except these seemed to be writhing. It took her a moment to realize that this
was an effect of the ugly red light in the walls, which pulsed and flickered
like a stuttering heart. After just a few seconds, looking at it made her dizzy,
so she looked at Teal’c instead.

Teal’c crouched, fingering the jagged line scratched into the wall. He looked
down the passage to the left. “This way.”

As soon as he said it, Sam knew he was right, as surely as if a voice had
told her she wasn’t going to die after all. The relief was so intense that tears
prickled in her eyes. All she had to do was follow that feeling, now. She set
off down the hallway at a run.

If someone had told Jack way back when that a time would come when he’d
prefer being ribboned to death to the alternatives, he’d have raised an eyebrow,
but he wouldn’t have discounted it. In some part of his mind, he’d always known
that the universe had something way worse in store for him than that. For a
while he thought he’d felt it when the human-form Replicator, First, had stuck his fingers in his head and picked the locks on all boxes where Jack
kept the really painful stuff. If he’d been capable of anything coherent enough
to pass for thinking, Jack would have remembered the Replicator’s probing as a
gentle thing, say, a nine on the agony scale. What he felt as that creature with
the mirrored eyes touched him—there wasn’t even a scale for this. First had
been incisive, slicing and winnowing his way to the core of things, elegant.
Even Ba’al had been a gentleman by comparison. This was Jack the Ripper, if Jack
the Ripper had been a wolf. With rabies.

Jack knew he was screaming—it was a fierce column of fire somewhere at the
edge of his awareness—and that was a good thing. Screaming meant he wasn’t
really gone, that he hadn’t been shredded, or atomized. He still had something
that could feel pain. So he willed himself to keep screaming.

Daniel wouldn’t like it, though.

Daniel’s grip had twisted his arm, brought him to his knees, held him there
like a sheep on an altar, offered up to her. Sacrifice. Appetizer. Bargaining
chip. Daniel wouldn’t like that part, either. A slow-moving slither of darkness
wound through the jagged, livid landscape of Jack’s mind: regret. Jack should
have killed him sooner, before he had to watch his own hands give Jack up to…
whatever the bitch was doing to him.

She was eviscerating him. Vivisecting him. If it had been a physical thing,
he’d be looking at his own limbs stripped of flesh, his heart there, hanging
from bloody shreds in the cage of his bones. She clawed through the meat and
matter of him, leaving behind tatters of thought, guts, gored memories, dreams
torn open and undone as she dragged herself through his mind. God, she was… huge. She went on forever and ever, scales scraping across his surface thoughts
with a hiss of protest, scouring. And for all the reptilian suppleness of her,
she was spidery, a million probing, inquisitive limbs everywhere, scuttling into
crevices, prying open every closed door, tearing out the contents and dissecting
them with dexterous fingers, moving on, moving on, moving on, looking for
something.

What?

Distantly, he felt Daniel’s fingers like handcuffs around his wrists. Sebek was laughing.
I’m sorry, Daniel,
Jack thought, but the
apology barely had a chance to form before it was threshed and discarded, and
Jack was left with only the slowly widening pool of loss, wordless, congealing.
It had a sound, a long, low note fading under the frenetic staccato of her
searching.

For what?

Jack would give it to her, tie it up in a bow and write
best wishes
on
the card if it only meant that he could fall down and Daniel’s hands wouldn’t
have to hold him anymore. No. He wouldn’t. He would never, never, never. But the
spidery thing skittered through him, let him hear Sebek laughing, and told him
in its sibilant, insistent voice that he would. He’d give it up if it meant that
Daniel didn’t have to be an accessory to this anymore.

All at once, there was a pause, a gasp of triumph he felt as an electric
shock along his spine, jerking his head back against Daniel’s thigh. She crooned
with the joy of discovery, and it was blue-black cold fading to pus-green around
the puckering of an old wound.

Kanan.

It was Kanan she was after, but there was nothing left of the Tok’ra but a
scum around the edges of Jack’s memory of Ba’al, an oily residue of Kanan’s
motivation, his actions that had led only to his host’s capture and torture.
Mostly there was a blank space scored and pitted by Ba’al’s repeated attempts to
find out what Jack knew, to harrow Kanan from Jack’s memory. For Jack, Kanan was
only a thing he’d grasped at and never really found. He was a nightmare,
insubstantial and still clinging to the waking world as a shudder of unease,
lingering resentment. What she could find was only that Kanan wasn’t evil, that
he really did believe in symbiosis, but still, he was superior and thoughtless
and ultimately Jack was his machine. And she found that Kanan carried in his
blue blood everything any snake in his line ever knew. The thrill of elation
that passed through the invader in Jack’s mind was followed by a sudden
frustration that exploded outward as dark, seething anger.

And then she was gone.

Jack slumped forward over his knees, barely caught himself with numb hands
before his forehead cracked against the floor. He lowered himself down and gingerly rested his cheek on the cold stone.

“Where is it?” Lorelei hissed, her voice like a serrated blade across Jack’s
brain.

He felt Daniel’s body moving away from him. Near his head were a pair of
heavy black boots. Aris.

“There is nothing here,” Lorelei said, the edges of her voice jagged. Jack
felt a swath of cold slash across the rubble in his head. “There is promise but
no… no… no—” Her voice staggered around in the debris, aimless.

“It is here, in us.” Sebek’s voice.

Jack pulled his hands in under his shoulders and started to heave himself up.

Sebek was still talking. Daniel stepped around Jack. “And so much more. We
can take so much more from this vessel. He carries the knowledge of the
Ancients. Those who imprisoned you. Those you hate.”

Her hiss sizzled across Jack’s vision. As he straightened, sitting on his
feet now, the room heaved. That may have been in his head, but one look at
Daniel, whose feet settled into a broader stance, said that he felt it too.

“We can take it,” Sebek said, his voice oil-smooth, insinuating. “You can
tear it from him and we can share this, this and all that I know, all that you
know. We can rule. We will be great.”

Jack managed to raise his head, lift it past the tipping point so that it
lolled back on his boneless neck. Daniel’s face was ecstatic, his eyes bright in
the lurid light. His skin was reddened, his face glistening with sweat. His
hands were held out to her. Sebek was offering Daniel to her.

“Nnngh—” Jack said before his momentum started to carry him backward. Aris
caught him with his knee and shoved him upright again.

Lorelei’s head gave that same oddly birdlike twitch as she assessed Sebek. “I
know the host will be a machine to you. I will not be a machine to you.” Her
chin came up and then fell again as she aimed those lifeless eyes at him. “I am
what I am. No less.”

“More,” Sebek promised, and his smile was wide and ugly.

Jack struggled to get up, but his muscles were jelly and Aris held him in
place. He pushed Aris back, knocking him away, but he barely had the strength to
get to his feet. Walking would take more muscle than he had to spare; the heavy
gravity anchored him to his place. There was no way he could move. Sebek was
moving, though, stepping toward that grotesque thing, and she extended her arms
to him in a parody of embrace. Her form nickered, disappeared, then reappeared
on the other side of the room, her back to the far wall which pulsed with deep
blue light. Her arms were spread wide. The winding tendrils of light in the
walls converged on her there, pierced her, ran through her. They pulsed like a
heartbeat. She was color and light.

“Do not deny me,” she crooned. The sound of her voice was a flare of
pleasure, stripping will away. Jack focused on hating her, on the threat she
represented, and the desire to join her receded. Sebek took one more step, then
another, and stopped, his foot inches from the floor, frozen in mid-stride.

“Stop,” Jack shouted. “Yes, Daniel, fight her, damn you! Fight this!” His
words were felled and flattened by the force of her attraction, which battered
him back even as she tugged Sebek to her with invisible strings. The deep red
flush on Daniel’s skin turned impossibly deeper. He was panting now, a sign of
the struggle Jack hoped to God was going on somewhere inside Daniel, a battle
for his life, or what was left of it. If she took the Goa’uld genetic memory, or
Daniel’s ascended knowledge, they were all screwed. He needed a weapon.
Anything.

Aris had a weapon. And he had a knife.

“Are you just going to stand there?” Jack said, turning on Aris, who was
watching with a mix of rapt fascination and horror. “Don’t you get it? Do you
want that thing loose on your planet?”

Aris turned to look at him, and it was as if Jack’s presence barely
registered with him. “She can’t really leave here,” he said, his eyes narrowing
as though he was struggling to make out Jack’s face. “She’s not real.”

“She looks pretty damn real to me,” Jack said.

Daniel let out a low moan, a sound that wasn’t Sebek but all Daniel. His entire body jerked, arms contracting in, palsied and curled to
his body, hands rigid, legs bent at the knees. He fell backward, convulsing.

Jack willed himself forward, but he only managed a single step before he was
on the ground, where he could use the floor to help him. He crawled, but the air
was quicksand, and he was sinking. “Come on,” he gasped, pinned by his own
weight. He could sense that thing behind him, could hear her sickening,
inaudible song, like pressure rising in his ears, like falling too fast from
high altitude. Daniel turned his head, and when he met Jack’s eyes, an agony of
fear and despair stared out at Jack. White foam bubbled at the corner of his
mouth. Daniel lifted a hand and smeared it away with his fingertips, looked at
it and back at Jack. As clearly as if Daniel had said it out loud, Jack knew he
was dying—the host, deteriorating, unable to withstand the pressure of that
thing’s attention.

“Don’t,” Jack whispered, unsure of who it was meant for. “You’re killing
him.”

The thousand-pound weight on his chest lifted and his lungs filled with air,
and he could move. He slumped to the ground, trying to get his bearings, but
Sebek was up and moving, his eyes a flash of yellow determination, fixed on
Lorelei’s shifting shape. Jack sat up and twisted to look at Aris, who moved to
put himself between Sebek and the wall.

“Now’s your chance,” Aris said, his blaster leveled at Daniel. He lifted the
knife from its holster and tossed it to Jack.