06 - Siren Song (13 page)

“No?” Jack said. “Do tell.”

“Sebek has ordered me to bring you back to the vault.”

There it was. Not unexpected. “You mean,
Daniel,”
Jack said, putting a
nice sharp point on his friend’s name.

“No, I mean Sebek,” Aris said, just as sharply. “Better get used to it.”

“Not likely,” Jack said.

Carter bent down to pick up her jacket, but Aris waved her off. “Won’t be
needing you today, Major. Just the Colonel here.”

“Why?” Carter said, then caught herself. “Er, I mean… not that the
Colonel’s not useful, but you might need my help. That device by the door may be
an access panel,”

“Sebek’s got that taken care of. With Dr. Jackson’s help, of course.” The
idea that Daniel would help Sebek in any way made Jack’s blood pressure notch up
ten points, but this wasn’t the time to start a battle. There’d be plenty of
chances for that later. Aris crooked a finger at Jack. “Let’s go.”

“Thanks so much for the vote of confidence,” Jack said to Carter, unable to
resist.

“You know what I meant, sir,” she said, face wrinkling up into an apologetic
grimace.

“Father?” From behind Teal’c, the kid’s voice seemed much smaller, more
unsure, than it was before, and he looked a lot more like a boy now, less like a
teenager. The expression on Aris’ face didn’t change, but his eyes went toward
the sound, and toward Teal’c standing watch over him. Teal’c didn’t seem to see
a difference between the Jaffa and the bounty hunter, where the kid was
concerned.

Aris moved toward his son. Teal’c, who had been a wall of resistance until
that moment, began to step aside but even so Aris shouldered into him,
staggering him off-balance. His face stony, eyes fierce, Teal’c righted himself
and stepped smoothly back into Aris’ path. When Jack twitched forward, one of
the Jaffa shoved the tip of a staff weapon into his back. Teal’c raised a
warning hand, but Aris caught it and knocked it aside.

“Don’t interfere,” Aris said, in a low voice. He and Teal’c stared at each
other for a long moment. Behind Jack, one of the Jaffa chuckled softly,
anticipating blood like a dog waiting for the kill.

Teal’c glanced up and met Jack’s eyes. There was a message in that direct
stare, but Jack had the frustrating feeling that he wasn’t catching on. He
dropped his gaze to Teal’c’s hand, the one Aris had pushed away; Teal’c’s
fingers were curled under, protecting something from view. Not enough time to get a good look, because Teal’c
clasped his hands behind his back, like he was giving up the field.

Now Jack’s eyebrow rose. Whatever Aris was up to, Teal’c was playing along.
Teal’c moved one shoulder aside, a minute gesture, and allowed Aris to pass.

Aris dropped to one knee beside the boy and briefly laid a hand on his hair,
not quite ruffling it. With his thumb, he rubbed smudges of dirt off the boy’s
face, but he said nothing. When he stood and returned to Jack’s side, he ignored
Teal’c. “Let’s go,” he said, and headed off down the corridor without looking
back.

With a last glance at Carter and Teal’c, Jack followed.

Sam leaned into the bars and peered into the hallway. It wasn’t getting
darker—the lights were glowing as steadily as ever—but it felt that way. As
she stared, the hallway seemed to get narrower and longer and grey around the
edges. Her knees were wobbly, and she had to curl her fingers around one of the
vertical struts and breathe slowly with her head down until the dizziness
passed. If something was going to happen, it had to be soon.

“What does Sebek want with him?” she wondered aloud, her forehead resting on
the bars while she watched the remaining Jaffa pace his way to the far end of
the corridor, pause, turn rather less than smartly and come toward her. He held
her gaze for a long moment, his mouth slanted up in a leer. She rolled her eyes
and leaned her back on the bars instead. “He’s got Daniel. What can the Colonel
offer him?”

The passing guard leaned closer than necessary, made a low noise that had to
be the Jaffa equivalent
of “how you
doin’?” which was so not right, she
didn’t even have a category for it. She stepped away from the support of the
bars and aimed a warning scowl in his direction. It got her a growling laugh in
return.

“Hands off,” she muttered, not quite loud enough for the Jaffa to hear.

Over by the wall, the kid was watching her. After a moment he smiled thinly,
shook his head and looked at the floor. Teal’c was following the guard with his eyes, and for brief moment, the look on his face
reminded her of her brother, way back in the Dark Ages before she’d joined the
Air Force, when he thought she was the one who needed protecting. She was
gratified to see Teal’c’s expression shift immediately to a sort of smug
warning, not of what he’d do, but what she could. She smiled tightly at the
Jaffa, asking him to try his luck. The guard’s laughter died abruptly. Teal’c
kept staring until the guard moved on out of sight.

Sam shrugged it off and went on, “You don’t think Sebek needs a new host
already, do you?”

She looked the question at the kid, but he was picking at his toenails and
clearly not interested in what the Goa’uld might want with Colonel O’Neill. Not
that he’d know anything, anyway, except maybe about how to die in a mine before
he turned fifteen. His reddish hair was thinning at the crown, she noticed, and
his scabby scalp showed through. She wondered if he’d seen protein in the last
year.

“Maybe you’re next,” the kid said without looking up, and Sam’s sympathy got
a little harder to hang on to.

“Perhaps not,” Teal’c said, drawing her attention.

He was holding something between his finger and thumb, a wafer about the size
and thickness of a credit card. He flipped it over and angled it into the light
cast through the bars from the corridor. It gleamed dully for a second before he
palmed it as the guard made his slow progress past them again.

When the guard was gone, Sam stepped closer and Teal’c held the contraband
out to her. It felt like a credit card, too, except that instead of embossed
with numbers it was a featureless grey. She raised her eyebrows at Teal’c. “Aris
slipped you this?”

“He did.”

“Did he include a note telling you what it is?”

“He did not.”

She turned to the kid. “Hey.” He didn’t look up. “Can you tell me your name?”

He raised his eyes slowly and looked at her from under lowered brows.

“Fine. We’ll go with Mr. Boch Junior, for now.” She held the card out for him
to see. “Do you know what this is?”

The spark in his eyes said “yes”; his shrug said he wouldn’t tell her anyway.
Sam wondered if teenage attitude was coded in the human genome, because the
annoying body language seemed to be universal. Cassie could have brought this
guy home to drive Janet nuts. Sam sighed. “Your dad slipped this to us. Maybe
you’ve seen something like it before.”

There was definitely something going on in that head, no doubt about it. His
eyes didn’t leave the card as she flipped it over, ran her thumb along its edge.
He shrugged again, as the guard appeared on his annoyingly regular drive-by. She
followed Teal’c’s example, hiding the card in her closed hand.

The kid started to scream.

Sam whirled to look at him and found him on his feet, his face inches from
hers. The smell of rotten teeth and hunger assaulted her as he screamed out the
last of his breath and sucked in another. He didn’t look scared or angry. He was
just screaming, long, raw-voiced howls, his fists clenched at his sides.

Before Sam could think of what to do in these perfectly bizarre
circumstances, and before Teal’c could put his hand on the kid’s skinny shoulder
or ask what was wrong, the cell door slid open and the guard was inside, his
staff aimed at a space somewhere between them as if he, too, were confused and
more than a little unsure as to whom he should be threatening.

“Cease this noise!” he bellowed.

The boy sucked in another breath. Then, mid-howl, he snatched the card from
Sam’s hand and made a break for the door.

It was insane. The Jaffa was right there, but the kid was spider-fast and
managed to make it a single step past him, just close enough to the door to grab
the doorjamb with one hand. The guard didn’t bother to wrestle with him. He
simply clotheslined him with the staff and flipped him onto his back on the
floor, finishing with the tip of the staff pressed into the kid’s sternum.
Teal’c lunged forward to get a hand on the guard’s arm. The guard twisted his
arm free, and in that moment, as Sam was pulling back a fist, she caught movement
from the corner of her eye. A second guard outside the bars. The
warning she tried to shout was chopped in half by her grinding teeth as the
zat
fire hit her, snapping her head back and whiting out her vision in a
searing flare of pain.

“Dirt-crazy,” someone said. And someone else was laughing.

With an effort, Sam managed to peel open an eye. Her bones were humming; she
could hear it, the blue dance of residual energy crackling around inside her
skull, and a ghostly skirling along her limbs. She was leaning up against the
cell wall, the weight of a large, firm hand on her shoulder keeping her from
dissolving altogether.

“They all go dirt-crazy,” the second guard replied to the first. They watched
through the bars, their faces twisted in identical sneers of distaste.

Beside her, the kid was in hysterics. In fact, he was laughing so hard he had
his arms wrapped around his middle and was slowly sliding sideways until he was
lying on the floor, curled up tight.

With a snort of disgust, the second guard walked away. Sam counted his
footsteps. There had to be another room beyond the cells, one that she hadn’t
seen when they came in. Only one guard in there? More? She swallowed hard
against the rising of her stomach and closed her eyes. The kid was winding down
to hiccups, each one a hook catching in her brain. The first guard stared at
them for a moment before returning to his pacing.

“What is amusing?” Teal’c asked.

The question must have been very funny, because it started the kid off again.
Only, this time, the laughter thinned to a wheeze that ended in a suppressed
sob. Sam could feel his bony body shaking next to hers. Her eyes on the empty
hallway beyond the bars, she groped blindly for him and laid a hand on his
shoulder but he shrugged her off, then pushed himself up so he could slouch a
couple of feet away from her.

He scrubbed his eyes angrily on the backs of his wrists before answering.
“Dirt-crazy,” he said, wiping his nose on ragged sleeve of his tunic. “We all go
dirt-crazy.” Tapping the side of his head with a grubby finger, he crossed his
eyes and let his tongue loll.

“Grit for brains. Corroded.” His face fell again into its regular lines of
resentment as he looked over Teal’c’s shoulder at the bars. “So they say.”

Teal’c thinned his lips in a frown of understanding tinged with disapproval.
“It was imprudent to act as you did.”

The kid watched the guard pass the cell, and then his eyes slid to Teal’c’s
and he lifted a hand from his lap to point at the door. “Perhaps not,” he
contradicted, perfectly mimicking Teal’c’s earlier intonation.

Teal’c turned to look. Something was bubbling along the edge of the door. A
thin, viscous grey line drooled down along the seam between the door and the
wall. Sam could smell something like lemons. Flapping her hand against Teal’c’s
leg, she waited for him to stand and then lever her up to her feet. She peered
first at the door, then at the kid.

“Some kind of acid?” she guessed. He shrugged, but the side of his mouth
curled up for a second. “The card?” The other side of his mouth turned up too.

She braced herself against the bars near the door and tried to see if the
solvent was visible from the outside. She couldn’t tell. The guard was leaning
against the wall at the end of the corridor, but he straightened up when she
leaned out, so she pulled back again and listened for his approach. No
footfalls. He seemed content to take a break from the pacing for a moment,
having made his point about their chances of escape. Beside her, the drool had
slithered its way to the floor. There was a faint hiss as the locking mechanism
released.

She grinned at Teal’c, who came to stand in front of the door. “Hey, kid,”
she said.

“Aadi,” he corrected her. He walked himself up the wall with his hands but
didn’t come to join them.

“Sorry. Aadi.” She spared some of the grin for him. “You get ready to move
when I say, okay? And stick close to us. Got it?”

He nodded.

She leaned her head against the bars again and caught the guard’s eye.
“Excuse me,” she called. “Can we get some water?” It was
only a gambit, but the word “water” made her already parched mouth even
drier.

“Rations at dawn,” the guard answered.

“Look, we haven’t had any water for two days.”

“Rations at dawn,” he repeated.

Making a show of desperation that wasn’t all that much of a show, Sam bowed
her head and let out a little sob. Then, reluctantly, she raised her head and
asked, “What do I have to do to get some now?” The cajoling drift of her voice
made her feel way more than a little creepy.

At that, the guard shouldered himself away from the wall and strolled toward
her. His smile showed perfect white teeth. When he shot a quick look down the
hall, probably toward the guardroom, Sam caught a faint, milky glow in his right
eye and noted the puckering of his eyelid. That must be why he was doing chump
work guard duty instead of fighting with Yu’s army: some old injury the larval
Goa’uld couldn’t fully heal. He was partially blind, maybe had some trouble with
depth perception. Sliding a glance at Teal’c, she rubbed her finger next to her
right eye and he nodded again.

Then she aimed her own smile at the guard as he leaned in closer. She licked
her lips and went on, “I bet I could trade something. No one has to know.”