SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (30 page)

When the anger had burned out, the righteous fury that demanded blood justice, then mercy would have its chance to win out, but for now there was a reckoning to be had. That, at least, was the kind of thinking the Jaffa could understand.

Teal’c walked away.

“You look like hell, buddy.”

He turned at the sound of O’Neill’s familiar voice behind him. The colonel had found a compact automatic pistol — that made sixty-nine guns — and was crouched down beside Daniel Jackson. He leaned in and had his hands — one over the other — pressed down hard over a deep wound. On the floor beside him lay a bloody wooden stake. More gunfire rattled the night.

Even through the rain and the dark, Teal’c could tell that his friend was in a bad way.

“Gonna need to brush up on my field medicine,” O’Neill said.

“I’d really rather you didn’t,” Daniel managed through clenched teeth.

“Quit being a girl, Daniel, and let me save your life. I can give you a bullet to bite on if you like?”

“Not necessary,” Daniel winced.

“Let’s get you patched up. We’ll let Fraiser handle the tough stuff.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Daniel Jackson said. He didn’t make another sound as O’Neill ripped strips from his shirt to pad the wound, and then bound it up with what was left. Without their kit there wasn’t much more he could do.

While O’Neill finished patching up Daniel Jackson, Teal’c debriefed them on what he had learned of the Goa’uld, Iblis, of Kiah, and of the tyrant Corvus Keen and the nature of the Rabelais Facility.

“Oh this day just keeps getting better and better,” O’Neill muttered, tying off the makeshift field dressing. “I don’t suppose you happened to overhear where this Goa’uld has hidden the Stargate, did you?”

“I did not.”

“Pity. Could have done with some good news right about now.”

“I found you alive, is that not good news?”

“Yeah, I guess it is, bud. I guess it is.”

* * *

The sixty-nine guns at Jubal Kane’s disposal became ninety-three. Five of the Corvani carried a second piece.

They had saved over nine hundred Kelani from the train. The numbers staggered Jack. Nine hundred. Jubal Kane’s men ushered them toward some unseen point in the distance. Jack knew the plan, what there was of one. He couldn’t argue with it because there wasn’t much to argue with. There had been fatalities, of course. Aside from the twenty Corvani Raven Guard, thirty-seven of the prisoners had proven too old and too weak to survive the crash. Another hundred or so were carrying injuries, broken bones, cuts, bruises. Some would die, most would make it.

The walking wounded helped with the worst of the victims, fashioning makeshift stretchers and the like to help bear them. Daniel had insisted on walking until the blood loss had made him all but pass out and O’Neill had insisted that, actually, no, Daniel couldn’t ‘walk just fine’, and made him take a ride on one of the stretchers.

Jubal Kane pointed at a dark smudge on the horizon. To Jack it looked no different than all of the other dark smudges he had seen as they walked. “The Rabelais Facility. It used to be a chemical processing plant until six months ago. Now it processes people. My people. That smoke, that’s some of them after they’ve been processed, if you catch my drift.”

O’Neill did. It wasn’t a particularly difficult drift to catch.

“The way I see it,” Jubal Kane continued, “we have a choice. Not much of a choice, I’ll grant you, but it’s still a choice. We can take these nine hundred hungry, sick and frankly beaten people back to the ghetto and await Keen’s retribution, or we can go about causing him some real pain. Those are our people in there, O’Neill. I think that makes it our call, don’t you?”

“And, let me guess, you’ve already made up your mind?” Jack squinted toward the smudge as though he might be able to make something else out of it. It stayed a black smudge no matter how much he screwed his eyes up.

“I have. We wouldn’t be walking this way otherwise.”

“Yeah? Well, good luck with that. All I want to do is get my people home. This isn’t our war.”

“Yet here you are in the middle of it, with no way to get your people home.” Kane stopped, a hand on O’Neill’s arm. “Help me win, and I will do everything I can to help you return home.”

“Those are long odds.”

“The Kelani are a strong people, O’Neill. Do not underestimate us.” He held out his hand. “Do we have a bargain?”

Jack looked at the offered hand, but did not take it. He didn’t trust this joker, not for a minute. There was stuff going on here he wasn’t party to, but just because he didn’t know what it was didn’t mean he couldn’t tell it stank. “Let’s talk to this explosives guy of yours and hear what he has to say for himself, shall we?”

The rain hadn’t let up in the last hour. Indeed, if anything it was worse now than it was when they had crawled out of the wreckage.

“Jachin, come here and explain to the colonel what we have in mind.”

Jack turned and gestured for Carter to join him. “Sir,” she nodded, wiping at the blood still smearing her face.

Jachin’s grin as he explained what he had in mind was wholly inappropriate. “Right, so, this place used to be a chemical processing plant. Most of the stuff has been cleaned out, the vats turned into holding cells, or worse. Anyway, we have intel that leads us to believe several of the chemicals they used to work with here were highly volatile in nature — and more interestingly for us, according to our man they aren’t exactly easy to clean away. We’re talking fumes eating into the metal of the vats themselves, and believe me, plenty of those pits are still lined with exactly the kind of explosive stuff we need for the fireworks.”

“Fireworks?” O’Neill said.

“Hasn’t Jubal explained?” Jachin shrugged, and then grinned. It was an infectious smile. Jack didn’t share it.

“Why don’t
you
tell me?”

“Well, we need a distraction, right?”

“Right.”

“We’re just talking about a lot of flash and bang, these are our people in there, after all.”

O’Neill nodded along with the reasoning but he still didn’t like where this was going. It wasn’t the plan so much as the people behind it; the lack of discipline of the Kelani’s, the gung-ho attitude of some of them, and, no bones about it, Jubal Kane. The man just rubbed him the wrong way. He trusted him about as far as Daniel could throw him.

“Basically, big tank go boom,” Jachin said, matching the ‘boom’ with an expressive gesture. “And while the guards flap around trying to put the fires out, we go in. Simple as that.”

“Providing nothing goes wrong,” Carter said.

“Nothing can go wrong. I know my explosives.”

Jack grunted. “Something
always
goes wrong.”

In this case
it didn’t so much go ‘wrong’ as it did ‘too well’.

Jachin did indeed know his explosives. He wired up a small device with a big enough charge to do more than singe a few eyebrows, and gave explicit instructions as to exactly where Carter should place it. Carter had drawn the metaphorical short straw. With O’Neill needed on the sharp end, ready to go in guns blazing, it was down to her as the smallest and fastest. She had argued O’Neill blue in the face. There wasn’t a viable alternative. He couldn’t be in both places at once. It was as simple as that. Still he had fought her on it every step of the way. It was his job to put his life on the line, not hers, was how he had so succinctly put it. That had ended the argument, but not in his favor. He didn’t trust Jubal. That distrust outweighed his protectiveness. That same distrust had steered him toward intervention in the first place. In a perfect world it would have been the insurgents attacking the encampment, the team not interfering with the history of this world. But there were times when it was impossible to merely observe, and this was one of them. There were too many lives and risk, and too many echoes of Earth’s own history to be ignored. So they had not only taken sides, they had become involved. And once involved, they were never going to sit back. They were committed to seeing this through to the bitter end.

She scurried forward, keeping as low as she could, head down looking at her feet as she moved, then back down to a tight crouch. Only then did she look up to scout out her next resting place. The rain had eased off, but hadn’t stopped. It made it easier for her to move unseen, but harder for her to hear anyone who might have gotten a little too close for comfort. All she could hope, as she offered a silent prayer to whatever god, demon, devil, imp or sprite, watched over bombers, was that it meant they couldn’t hear her either. Fair was fair, after all.

She dropped down flat onto her stomach and crawled on elbows and knees through the short grass. Searchlights from the watchtowers strobed across the facility erratically, lacking any kind of identifiable pattern. Either the soldiers manning the lights were exceptionally disciplined, or they were chasing moths with the bright beams. Either way, it made her job of slipping in under the fence unnoticed that much more difficult.

Sam counted out three minutes. In that entire time the searchlights didn’t cross the same patch of ground once. Sometimes they played out toward the dark corners, other times they ran along the edge of the perimeter fence or right through the center of the yard. Once, midway through the count, one of the lights worked its way up the wall of the five story building and illuminated the entire roof.

It was an elaborate dance. She half expected hippos in tutus to pirouette their way from super trooper to super trooper.

There were seven chemical vats. They were huge cylindrical containers lined up like bowling pins that towered over the complex more than ten times her height. Full, one of those going up was going to provide more than fireworks. God only knew what the residual fumes would do — God only knew what the residual fumes
were
.

Her instinct was to hit the first one at the front of the diamond — in terms of line-of-least-resistance it was the easiest both to reach and to escape, but it was also the easiest one for the searchlight to pick out, so she discounted it.

She moved forward to a grassy knoll, ten feet closer to the fence, where she could better see the comings and goings of the guards. Right then she would have killed for a pair of binoculars never mind night vision goggles. She had nothing but the moon.

Sam lay there for another ten minutes watching the men to see if they were any less erratic than the lights. They weren’t. Two of them, she saw, walked a short distance away from the compound’s fence into the shadows of nearby trees — she couldn’t be sure but they appeared to be necking back a bottle of something, meaning they wouldn’t be too interested in what happened to their little strip of fence for the next few minutes. It was moving faster than she was ready for. Sam pushed herself to her feet. The wet grass soaked through her BDUs, making them cling uncomfortably. She checked off to the right once, and then ghosted down the hill toward the length of fence she’d decided to cut through.

Every step of the way she expected to hear the blare of a klaxon going off and for the searchlights to all swivel around to focus on her. It didn’t happen.

She hit the fence and fell to her knees, digging quickly with her hands to scuff up enough of the bottom wires for her to start cutting through them. Each individual link took her seven seconds to sheer through using the wire cutters the Kelani had given her. They were blunt almost to the point of uselessness. She needed to cut through six to be able to squirm underneath the fence, seven or eight to be on the safe side. In less than one minute she was through and on the other side.

As Sam dragged herself through the dirt — kicking out with her feet almost as though she were swimming — the first dogs barked. It was the other sound she hadn’t wanted to hear. She tried to judge how far away the animals were; there was no way to know if they were running free or if they had handlers reining them in. Either way, she had to run — difficult in her weakened state — sending all of her time calculations out the window. “Just great.”

She looked over her shoulder. The drinkers were still drinking, but it looked like they were about to put the cap back on their bottle. She didn’t wait to see if they decided to light up a smoke: she didn’t need to, they were already reacting to the barking dogs. She ran. Straight across the dirt yard toward the chemical vats, arms and legs pumping hard. Three hundred yards at a full sprint — it should have been comfortable, even running hell for leather, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten. Halfway and her head was spinning. Fifty yards from the drums and she was running blind, her eyes refusing to focus. The last ten had her stumbling tangle-footed and falling, picking herself up only to fall again. How no one saw her was a miracle.

She unwrapped the explosive with shaking hands, willing her head to stop spinning. It was a primitive device, little more than two sticks of dynamite and a timer really, and she primed it quickly, giving herself two minutes to get clear. It would have to be enough.

Sam pressed it onto the metal casing of the drum, wedging it up against the welding on the lower stanchion exactly where Jachin had told her to. The force of the explosion would tear the weld apart and leave a gaping hole in the outer casing of the drum. The fumes would leak out, come into contact with the smoldering fragments of the bomb and everything would go up in a second lethal explosion.