06 - Siren Song (17 page)

“Maybe Selmak hasn’t had good coffee.”

“Maybe Air Force coffee is what convinced Selmak coffee was evil,” Jacob
said, and pushed back from his chair. “Come on. How about if you grab those
mission files? We can go through some of them ourselves.”

The hallway on the other side of the door was empty. Sam nodded to Aadi, who
stepped up beside her, Teal’c close behind.

“Which way?” she demanded.

He pointed left, and they set off at a jog. Although they stepped as lightly
as possible on the stone floor, their footsteps still echoed in the narrow
passage. The hallway was lit by recessed pot lights in the ceiling, which cast
bright circles on the floor and left the spaces in between in darkness.
Obviously they were outside the holding area; this kind of lighting would be
counterproductive when it came to keeping an eye on prisoners.

“What is this place?” she asked Aadi as they slowed to a stop beside another
door and he waved her past it toward the one at the end of the hall.

“Quarters, I think,” he whispered.

That brought Sam up short again. “You’re taking us through troop quarters?”

He flashed teeth in a smile that stopped just this side of mockery. “Slaves,”
he clarified. “From when Sebek used this building, before the landing station
and the big ship.”

“So, abandoned, then, right?” His answer was a shrug. Sam aimed a look over
his head at Teal’c. “Hopefully.”

The door at the end of the hall was locked. She pulled the panel off the wall
beside it and got to work on the crystals, while Aadi chewed his thumb and
Teal’c kept a wary eye on the corridor behind them. How long until dawn and
somebody came with rations and found the guards? Guard, she corrected herself,
as she wiggled a sticky crystal free. Apart of her brain caught a wistful thread
on the idea of rations.

“What is beyond this door?” Teal’c asked.

Aadi shrugged again. “I think laundry. Or kitchens. I was little when I was
here.”

Sam re-slotted the crystal. Nothing happened. She started over.

“Your father worked in the laundry?” That image started out as amusing, but
didn’t stay that way.

He must’ve seen it on her face, because he looked away. She was considering a
“sorry” when the door cracked open, and a wedge of light fell into the hallway.

“Well,” she said, her eye to the opening. “Not abandoned.”

It was definitely the laundry. The door opened onto a small landing that
looked down on a long, well-lit room lined on one side by steaming vats as tall
as Aadi, and on the other side with some kind of static driers. Down the middle,
colorful linens and robes hung on wires, dripping into a drainage trough that
ran the length of the room. At two of the driers, slaves were laying clothing
out on racks, pulling them taut and sliding the racks into the open mouths of
the machines. Other slaves stood ready to pull the racks out immediately,
unclipping the now-dry material and dropping it in careful layers onto hand
trucks, which were rolled down to the misty far end of the room for pressing.
Discounting the
ha’tak,
this had to be the only good-smelling room on
the whole planet, and she wondered if the scent of laundry soap was another one
of those galactic constants, like fir trees and sullen teenagers.

Fortunately all fourteen slaves were too busy with their work to pay much
attention to a doorway leading to an empty part of the complex, and she and
Teal’c managed to slide the panels open far enough for them to squeeze through,
Aadi first under Teal’c’s arm, then Sam. The door sighed shut behind them as
they crouched together on the landing. In the middle of the side wall beyond the
driers, a good thirty, forty paces away, was the only other door. At the far
end, next to the pressers, a single Jaffa was leaning on his staff, looking
bored and unhappy in the thick humidity. Sam didn’t envy him his chain mail and
greaves.

Silently, Teal’c aimed the blade of his hand at the hand trucks collected at
the bottom of the stairs, each one with a basket big enough to hold a person.
Sam crept down the stairs, bent low to keep behind the inadequate cover of the
meshing along the railing. From the bottom of the stairs, she waved at them to
follow her. The humming of the machines covered the sound of their boots on the steps. Aadi’s bare feet were silent.

Once at the bottom, Teal’c climbed into the basket and Sam, smaller and a
little more agile, crouched behind it, helping Aadi get some momentum going
before leaving him to push and half-crawling beside it. She kept an eye on their
shadow as they went, to make sure that her own wasn’t at all visible around that
of the truck. They stuck close to the wall so that Sam was sandwiched in pretty
tightly. Occasionally, when Aadi’s steering got sloppy, or the truck jogged on
the cracked concrete of the floor, she found herself pinned and had to shove
with her shoulder to get Aadi back on track. Still, they made good progress.

About halfway to the door, someone spoke to Aadi, a low hiss of recognition
and alarm, and the hair rose on the back of Sam’s neck. She heard him murmur
something that sounded like “Esa” and “Bren,” and whoever it was moved away. A
moment later, Sam could hear a man singing. Another, thin, wavering voice picked
up the song, and another, farther off, until the song rose and fell around them,
weaving its mournful way through the thrumming of the machinery. When they were
even with the door, two men—she could make out the tops of their heads—rolled a wire rack hung with robes along beside them, blocking the guard’s view
of the open doorway. Someone else, a woman bowed in half like she had some kind
of bone disease, came up beside Aadi and took the cart from him. Hidden behind
the rack, Teal’c stood and stepped out of truck, while a third man heaped
clothing into the now empty cart. Nodding their thanks the three of them quickly
slipped out the door.

Sam took a moment to get her bearings and to stretch the tension from her
legs. She wasn’t feeling too steady. She glanced up at Teal’c, who was looking
away down the corridor toward the next set of doors.

“Aadi,” she said. “We have to find our gear. We need—” Teal’c’s pointed look
made her change her mind about mentioning the tretonin in Teal’c’s pack.
“There’s equipment we’ll need when we access the ’gate.”

Aadi snorted in disbelief and then laughed. “You can’t get to the ’gate.
It’s in Sebek’s room, the place where he sits in his big chair and—”

“We can deal with that later,” Sam interrupted him. “We need the gear. Do you
have any idea where it might be?”

“It is likely that it will be stored near the armory,” Teal’c answered,
“which will be on the ground level, and carefully guarded.” He didn’t look too
happy about that. “It may be more prudent to find Aris Boch and use his
authority to gain us access.”

Sam gazed blindly down the hallway. “Maybe.” Then she looked earnestly at
him. “How long?” He would’ve taken his dose of tretonin before leaving Earth,
but she couldn’t remember if he’d had one on Relos before they were captured.

Drawing himself up even straighter, if that were possible, Teal’c said, “I
will be fine.”

“How long?”

He answered reluctantly. “A day, perhaps two under good conditions.”

“Right.” And a planet with heavy gravity, arid toxic atmosphere, two days
already with minimum rations and practically no water, and the certainty of
hand-to-hand combat. So much for “good conditions”. She found herself wrinkling
her nose the way the Colonel did. “Okay, we’ll have a look at the ground floor.
We have to pass through there, anyway. If it looks good, we go for the gear, and
if not, we head for the mine and go with your plan.”

“Agreed.”

They started off again, and were a few paces away before Sam realized that
Aadi wasn’t with them. She stopped and looked back. He was standing in the
middle of the hallway looking uncertainly first at them, and then back toward
the doorway to the laundry.

“Aadi,” Sam whispered as loudly as she dared. “Let’s go. It’s not safe here.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to go there,” he said in a low, scared
voice. “You can get your own gear.” He cast another longing look toward the
laundry. “Esa can sneak me out in the linens.”

Sam stole a glance through the doorway. The view was still blocked by the
drying rack. “Can Esa take all of us?”

He hesitated and shook his head. “No. They won’t take you. Him.” He aimed his
chin in Teal’c’s direction as he came toward them. “Maybe they’ll turn you in
for favors.” He took a step backward toward the door. “You go. Through that door
and then around—there’s a big room with windows in the roof, and then the
doors out.”

Teal’c leaned close to her ear to murmur, “He will betray us.”

Inside the room, the rack rattled as someone moved it away from the door, and
Sam pushed Aadi up against the wall out of sight. She could hear the Jaffa
shouting something and the sudden hiss of escaping steam. Trucks rumbled by.

Her eyes close to Aadi’s she asked, “Would you?”

He shook his head.

“Your father would.”

“I won’t.”

He would. She knew he would. And if they let him go, they’d lose the only
leverage they had with Aris. The idea of holding a kid hostage made her feel
dirty and heavy, but the whole place made her feel dirty and a little extra
weight on her conscience would be bearable if it got them—all of them—off
this awful planet. Maybe.

“We can protect you.”

“None of you can protect me.”

“You trust this Esa person to protect you.”

Aadi frowned. “He’s different.” He cast another nervous look over his
shoulder and pushed her away. “They’re changing shifts. If I don’t go now—”

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by the sudden shrieking of an alarm.

“Our escape has been discovered,” Teal’c said as he circled Aadi’s arm with
his hand and began to draw him down the hallway away from the door. “There is no
time for this debate.”

Aadi set his feet and struggled against Teal’c, but it was no use: Teal’c
looped an arm around his waist and picked him up like a suitcase while Sam
trotted along behind them. She caught up in time to clamp a hand over Aadi’s
mouth, preventing him from shouting out.

“You want to go back to that cell?” A shake of the head and wide eyes. “We
aren’t going to hurt you, but if you aren’t quiet, the only ones who are going
to come here to save you are Jaffa. Your choice.”

The kid went slack in Teal’c’s grip, resigned. She nodded to Teal’c, and he
put the boy down. Aadi barely had his feet on the ground before they heard a
shout behind them. The Jaffa was in the hallway with the bent woman, who was
pointing at them.

“Oh crap,” Sam said, and both she and Teal’c raised their
zats.
They
were too far away still, so instead of shooting they turned to run. Aadi slammed
into the door at the end of the hallway and curled himself into a ball at its
foot while Teal’c returned fire. Sam yanked the panel off the wall. Two crystals
in, two out, one here, the other there. The door snapped open, tumbling Aadi
into the atrium beyond. Scooping him up with one arm, Teal’c continued to fire
until Sam ducked through the doorway after them. When it closed, she shot the
control panel with the
zat,
covering her face with her hand against the
shower of sparks.

The atrium was huge, the length of a football field with an arched glass
ceiling that revealed a roiling grey sky, lit in the east by a thin wash of red.
They were standing on a mezzanine that circled the room on all four sides, a
couple of stories above the main floor. Sam risked a peek over the edge. In the
central space, a smattering of Jaffa met in the middle for instructions and then
dispersed. One of them looked their way and pointed.

“The door!” Sam shouted at Aadi over the rising sound of pounding boots.
“Where is it?”

He whirled in place to scan the room and finally pointed. “There. Down!”

Sam followed his outstretched arm. She couldn’t see the doors themselves, but
a ruddy light stained the main floor in a long rectangle at the far end of the
atrium. “I don’t think down is going to be an option.”

There were two stairwells leading up to the mezzanine, one on either side of
the room. Both were between the fugitives and the doors. Three Jaffa were
storming up the stairs on the left, another four on the right. No chance of going either way.

“Here,” Teal’c called, and waved them toward a narrow side hallway. Slipping
into it, Sam counted five doors leading off of it, two on either side and one at
the end. Teal’c slapped the control panel for the nearest door on the left, but
before they could make it inside, the door at the end of the hall opened and a
Jaffa stepped through. The staff blast cooked the air beside Sam’s face. She
threw herself against the wall, twisting away from it and toward Teal’c and
Aadi. Teal’c turned away too, trapping Aadi behind the wall of his back, like
she’d seen so many Jaffa do when they shielded their Goa’uld charges with their
own armored bodies. Only Teal’c had no armor.

He fell heavily, smoke rising from his left side, his staff weapon spinning
out onto the mezzanine. Sam didn’t pause to assess the damage, but twisted
around on her knee and
zatted
the Jaffa twice. A quick check over her
shoulder showed her Teal’c rising to his hands and knees, then sitting back on
his heels. He waved her on as Aadi bolted through the open side door. Five long
steps took her to the end of the hall where she leaped over the dead Jaffa and
stabbed the control panel. The door slid open. Another narrow hallway, this one
dark. She reached an arm inside, pulled off the control panel, yanked out as
many crystals as she could hold in one hand, and tossed them on the floor, where
they shattered. Then, holding the door open with the toe of her boot, she pulled
off her jacket and dropped that, too. She let the door close, the sleeve of her
jacket showing at the seam where the two panels came together. Then she sprinted
the few paces back down the hall and threw herself into the next room, past
Teal’c who was holding the door open for her, and colliding spectacularly with
Aadi. Somehow, he ended up in her lap on the floor, both of them facing the
door, her hand clamped again over his mouth. Teal’c locked the door as footsteps
stormed past them.