SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (5 page)

“Okay, now you’ve got my attention,” O’Neill said, looking up from his hands. “What are we talking about here? Big? Small? Breathes fire? Lay it on me.”

“Mujina is an archetypal creature, O’Neill.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

It was Daniel who answered, not the Tok’ra woman. He pushed his glasses back along his nose. “Archetypes are personality templates, Jack. Joseph Campbell identified them during his research into the monomyth, the single story that is at the root of all the others. There’s the Mentor, the Hero, ah, others that are more obscure, like the threshold guardian, or the herald, then, more interestingly, the shadow, which is the embodiment of everything we would like to defeat, and the shapeshifter —”

“Now hold on a minute,” O’Neill cut across Daniel. “Are you telling me this ‘weapon’ has the ability to change shape? That’s a bit more than breathing fire…”

“Not physically, I doubt,” Daniel said, and then turned to Jerichau for confirmation or denial. “Shapeshifting in this respect relates more to the fact that the shapeshifter is more of a catalyst, it makes things happen and you are never quite sure as to its allegiances.”

“So it
can’t
change shape?”

“Jerichau?”

“Doctor Jackson is quite right in his summation of the Mujina’s gifts. It is an archetypal creature, a blank slate if you like, capable of being all things to all people, from hero to shadow, shapeshifter and trickster.”

“So you’re saying it isn’t to be trusted.”

“In the wrong hands nothing is, Colonel O’Neill,” the Tok’ra said.

“And, let’s be blunt, the wrong hands would be Goa’uld,” Jack finished the thought for everyone around the table. Jerichau nodded. “Now, let me get this straight,” he said, “this creature, whatever you call it, how many of them are there? I mean are we talking about mom and pop and baby Mujina makes three, or are we talking about a planetful of happy little shapeshifters?”

“There is only one Mujina, Colonel O’Neill, and the planet Nyren Var found it on, Vasaveda, was its prison.”

“And there goes the other shoe,” Jack said.

Teal’c raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Oh come on, you heard the weapon comment. A prison the size of a planet must make it one hell of a critter.”

“Imagine the greatest evil of your time, that could be a reflection of Mujina, but conversely Mujina has the potential to be the greatest hero known to your people.”

“All things to everyone,” Daniel said. “The only place it is safe from the reflection of evil is away from everyone else. Can you imagine this in someone like Apophis’ hands?” He looked at Teal’c. The Jaffa said nothing.

“I’d rather not.”

“A dark and hungry god arises,” Jerichau said. The metallic quality of her tone shifted, becoming immediately softer and more feminine. “That is why Nyren Var had to find the creature first, so it could never be turned fully into the weapon it has the potential to be. It needs people around it to define it.”

“How did the Goa’uld find out about the Mujina?” Sam asked, speaking up for the first time.

“There is only one way,” Selina Ros admitted. “The information must have come from within the Tok’ra; which means there is a traitor within our number.” Her voice shifted, dopplering down to the metallic chill of the symbiote’s filtered tone. Her face twisted in revulsion, her lips suddenly thin and blanched of color. “Which is impossible, so thinking about it serves no one,” Jerichau finished for her host.

“So, to get back to the smoking hand,” O’Neill said, making it quite plain that he didn’t swallow Jerichau’s protestations any more than Selina Ros did. It was interesting, seeing the host and symbiote openly disagree. He couldn’t remember having seen it in any of the Tok’ra he had met before. “Your woman went to this prison, found the creature in all of its glory, but was compromised before she could exfiltrate?”

“I do not think, Colonel O’Neill, I fear, there is a difference. The planet of the Mujina lies in interdicted space, out far beyond the protection of the Asgard. It was banished centuries before, when all reason would have seen the creature put to death. Now we face the consequences of our predecessor’s vacillation.”

“You can’t kill it because of its nature, that’s inhumane,” Daniel objected. “If what you say is right, it isn’t inherently evil, not as we would understand it, and left alone it isn’t dangerous. So by any conceivable measure that would be cold blooded murder.”

“Which is precisely the argument they made, and yet by
showing mercy and seeking to hide it, the Ancients have left us
vulnerable. So which is the greater wisdom, Doctor Jackson? The death of one or the death of many? Which would your conscience prefer? What would appease your guilt? Perhaps you would sacrifice worlds?”

“That is enough, Jerichau,” Hammond said, his voice every bit as cold and alien as the Tok’ra’s.

“As you say, Hammond of the Tau’ri,” Jerichau ceded.

“There’s still something you aren’t saying,” Jack said. It had been bothering him from the start.

“Does it really need saying?”

“I’d like to hear it anyway,” O’Neill said.

“Very well. We cannot risk Mujina’s unique gifts being twisted to the will of the Goa’uld.”

“Which means you want us to go find it and clean up the mess your Neryn Var has left behind, right?”

“We do not have the resources to fight the Jaffa face to face, our strength is infiltration, working in the shadows. That is where we are best deployed in this long game. You, however, Colonel O’Neill, are very much soldiers. This is the side of the fight where your kind excel.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Jack said wryly.

The creature huddled up against the hot wall.

It was alone.

That was its curse.

It was always alone.

All it wanted — in this world or any other — was company. It had never needed more. Never wanted more. It craved nearness. It hungered for the proximity of thoughts and minds, the needs of hopes and dreams. But that was all. It had never harmed anyone. It was not evil.

It was not this thing they accused it of being when they passed down their judgment. They acted like gods of the galaxies lording it over the lesser species, claiming to protect those too weak to stand up to the aggressors, but that was the nature of survival, the galaxies were divided into two kinds of species, the predators and the prey. They judged it a predator, which was cruel, and the punishment they meted out was vile in its harshness.

It was no predator. All it ever wanted was to help, to serve the needs of those near it so that they might like it. Its needs were childish in their simplicity.

How could that ever be wrong?

But their words still echoed in its ears all these centuries later:
Vile. Evil. Corrupt. Dangerous. An abomination. A threat. Against the natural order.

It pleaded and whimpered but they would not listen. They did not care. They would not look it in the eye as they sought to silence it, to stifle it, to lock it away alone in the dark and leave it to die.

But it would not die.

Not alone.

Not like this.

So it scavenged and it made a nest deep down in the dark out of the fire, down where the fungi and the lichen clung to the sticky wet heat of the stones, safe. It survived on the spores, for every mouthful it ate spreading another out so that more might grow in its place. It lost time — or the sense of it — day and night ceased to be of any importance. Instead it judged its place in the world by the rumbles of the lava and the gasses trapped deeper beneath the crust, venting their rage as the pressures built up beyond the ground’s ability to cage them. At first it had counted the eruptions but when the numbers rose into the meaningless it gave up.

And through it all it was alone.

Until the woman came.

It had thought she was different. She didn’t judge it. She didn’t fear it. She had found it down here stumbling around in the darkness and followed it back to its nest. She had helped it. She had soothed it. She had shared herself with it willingly, letting it into her mind so that it could taste all she held dear, so that it could understand her losses and her pains, her hopes, fears, and the needs that drove her. And it did understand. They were kindred creatures for all their differences. They were cut from the same spiritual cloth. They sought to help, only ever to help.

It had sung to her, not with words because it had forgotten the shapes of so many of them, but with harmonics, resonances it found pleasing. She had smiled and, touching its rough cheek, promised that she would protect it, that it didn’t have to be alone, and even as she lied to the Mujina and said it was safe, the others had come. Those she feared most in the world. It had sought them out, creeping closer so that it might taste their minds and learn their dreams and desires, but they were dark. The creature knew it could never be safe. Not with the others here. So it had tried to trick them for her, but one among them was stronger. It did not fall for the Mujina’s mind games. With its power broken, the outsider had the others bind and gag it, robbing the Mujina of its sight and voice and effectively locking it out of their minds — and for once the Mujina did not want to help, it did not want the woman to come find it and save it, it wanted only to be left alone…

And was rewarded.

She had left it, like all of the others before her, all promises forgotten, broken. It was ever the same, the Mujina fated to be alone, it thought bitterly. But that was not fair. The others had hunted the woman to extinction. She had not left willingly. Her only crime was that she had not come back.

So it pressed its back up against the warm wet stones and rocked slowly forwards and back, forwards and back, each time a little further forward, a little harder back, until the rough points of the stone dug into its flesh. It needed to feel physical pain. Nothing else would block out the spiritual hurt.

It screamed out into the dark, a wretched, primal cry torn from its ragged lips.

It was alone.

Again.

How long would it be before others came through the dead eye looking for it? How many more eruptions would it count off before the eye lit up blue with its own fire? How much longer would it be before she came back to it?

It cried silent tears into the rough cloth covering its face, and sang again the song it had sung for her, hoping somehow she would hear the harmonics and come back to it.

It was never meant to be alone.

SG-1 kitted up.

Daniel sat with Jerichau learning all he could about the prison planet. The woman was fascinating. Quite unlike many of the Tok’ra they had encountered. For one thing, she had a sense of humor. He had rather enjoyed seeing Jack squirm while she toyed with him. It was usually Daniel’s role to play tongue-tied and twisted whereas Jack was always so together. It was part of that bad-boy charm of his. It was funny, with all this talk of archetypes, he couldn’t help but think of them in the same vein. He had thought it would be easy to hang a label on each of them, Jack the hero, dynamic and strong, Teal’c the shapeshifter who had begun his time in the shadows only to come over to the light, Daniel himself as the mentor, offering knowledge instead of brawn, and Sam another aspect of the teacher, like Daniel but then so unlike him, but their roles weren’t remotely so straightforward. Sometimes Teal’c wore the mantel of hero, at other times Sam, or Daniel himself. It was as though collectively they owned the attributes of the hero, the best and the worst, and together they were so much more than the sum of their parts.

But then that was what being a part of a team like SG-1 was all about, wasn’t it?

Vasaveda lacked a breathable atmosphere: indeed if everything Jerichau said was the truth they were about to willingly enter a Miltonesque landscape of Paradise most certainly lost. She talked of a world so harsh it beggared belief; volcanic fissures venting steam, red lava leaking out of the ground as though the planet itself wept for the Hell it had become. She described wonders that resonated with the Christian iconography of that blasted place, the unending barren wasteland, the unbearable heat, the volatility of the oxygen in the air that caused the sky itself to ignite in flame and burn for days on end. He listened to it all and understood that no amount of planning or forethought could prepare them for Vasaveda. She was painting a picture of a place so wretched it was impossible to imagine finding it inhabited at all. The worst of it, though, was her contention that the Ancients had somehow made it that way, and that it had not always been so.

“We believe the Mujina has taken refuge in an elaborate subterranean network not far from the Stargate itself. Nyren Var’s transmission was cryptic: see the world through the old man’s eyes.”

“Well that makes a lot of sense,” Daniel said.

“It is all we have, but hopefully it will be clear when you arrive on the prison planet.”

She wrote out seven symbols on the scrap of paper Daniel placed on the table between them. “The co-ordinates to hell,” he said to himself as he studied them. He felt a thrill of fear chase down the ladder of his spine as he picked the paper up. It wasn’t just that the place she described so vividly unnerved him, far from it actually — he’d been to hell and back before and it could hardly be worse than Ne’tu. No, it was the thought of bringing back the Mujina that placed a chill in his heart, because of all of them, Daniel Jackson understood the implications of a creature that could twist itself to represent all things to all people. History was riddled with examples of power corrupted. In each of those cases there was nothing
super
natural to amplify them. If mankind alone was capable of such darkness, what was it capable of with a creature like the Mujina at its side?