06 - Siren Song (19 page)

“Guess it wouldn’t be prudent to split up,” Jack said. He moved a bit further
down the corridor, counting steps. Maybe the people who’d built this place could
tell one hallway from another, but there was no chance he’d be able to. Each
wall was the same, as far as he could tell. Of course, the writing was probably
different, and maybe Daniel could tell, but to Jack’s untrained eye it was as
meaningless as chicken scratch. Less, even. Sebek didn’t seem like he was going
to offer up any advice, though, so Jack could be wrong about Daniel. Or maybe
Daniel was clamming up in there, somehow. Wishful thinking.

“Choose a direction,” Sebek ordered.

Jack turned back to make a smart remark and was momentarily startled by the
sight of Daniel’s face, watching him intently. No matter how long they were at
this, the sight of not-Daniel was going to be a nasty shock every time. But then
his attention was captured by something else. “Hope you weren’t planning on
leaving anytime soon,” he said, and pointed back the way they’d come. The
ambient light lingered behind them, slowly fading now, but augmented by a weird,
shifting glow. Where the door had been, there was now a seamless patch of wall,
black, without writing. The dark surface was vaguely iridescent, oddly slippery
to the gaze, like it was there, and it wasn’t, like it was solid and somehow
fluidly rippling, too.

Aris shouldered past Jack and Sebek and holstered both his glowstick and weapon, so his hands would be free to touch. He ran his fingers
around the outline of the door, then across its surface, and his frown cleared.
He nodded, confirming an unspoken assumption. He thumped the barrier with the
back of his knuckles, snatching his hand back quickly and shaking it vigorously.
“Force field,” he reported. “Not rock or metal.” He looked down at his hand and
rubbed his knuckles. “Tingly.”

Jack started back toward him, but Sebek stepped into his path. “Our goal is
that way,” he said, aiming his chin over Jack’s shoulder. “Move.”

Jack turned and looked down the corridor toward the juncture. He sighed.
“Onward, then.”

“Looks like it.” Aris made no move to come back to the front, and Jack pursed
his lips. He should have known.

Something brushed past him.

He turned, arm outstretched, ready to strike with the flashlight, but there
was nothing there. The low-grade nausea that had been dogging him since his
first hour down in the mine rose, bile burning the back of his throat. He lost
his balance and staggered sideways, crashing into one of those blank pillars.
Not enough support to keep him on his feet, though, and he pitched over onto the
ground. He beat back panic—so not like him; he and panic weren’t that well
acquainted—and tried to focus. Something was making him feel this way,
something out of his control. He had to
get control.

Dimly, he could hear Sebek moaning. Too bad he couldn’t get over there to
shake the damn snake loose—he could snap his neck so easily… Daniel’s neck
Jack put his hands over his ears and struggled to catch his breath. He couldn’t
hurt Daniel.
Not now. Not yet.

Aris knelt beside him and hauled him up to a sitting position. “Fight it,” he
growled. “Pull yourself together.”

“We have to get out of here,” Jack said through gritted teeth. “We can’t stay
down here.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Aris hissed. Behind him, Sebek thrashed on the
ground. Jack stared at him, until Aris shook his shoulders, hard. “You’re going
to help me, and then I might help you.
Might.
But you have to get up. Get
moving. Fight this.”

“Fight
what
?” Jack shook his head, but the dizziness came back with a
vengeance. “What the hell is it?”

“Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Aris said. He pointed down the corridor.
“As soon as you choose. Right or left.”

“Damn it,” Jack said. He pushed Aris’ hand off his arm and crouched by the
wall, half sitting, half standing. Sebek had rolled over on his belly and was
quiet. “Guess you’d better pick him up, too.”

Aris gave him a sharp look. “Don’t even think about killing him.”

Jack opened his mouth to say that was his
friend
trapped in there,
that he wasn’t going to consider that option now… but he’d be a liar. He had
pictured it all, in those moments of rage, down to the sound Daniel’s neck would
make when it snapped, the crunch of bone beneath the force he’d apply. He
shuddered and closed his eyes. “Hurry up,” he told Aris. “Let’s get to it.”

The watery sunlight seeped through the latticework across the window and drew
clumsy, blurred lines of shadow across Teal’c’s face, his bared chest. Sam’s
hands moved in and out of the light as she swiped the rag gently across the burn
above his hip and sat back a little to squeeze the blood into the bowl at her
knees. With a grimace, she leaned in close and peered at the wound. It was ugly,
a charred arc glistening black. It would be red if the sun weren’t so wan. But
the staff blast had hit obliquely and the wound wasn’t deep, thank goodness. It
was painful, but hopefully not life-threatening. Sam suspected that she’d do
better to worry about the quality of the water and the rags she was using to
bind him up. The cloth was blackened with soot, and an oily film floated on the
surface of the bowl, making slow-moving rainbows that scattered when she finally
dropped the rag into the bloody water for the last time.

Teal’c’s chest rose and fell slowly but regularly, and his eyes darted behind
closed lids. As she sat on her heels, watching him, her teeth in her lip, Sam
tried to make her brain think forward. Without the tretonin there was no way for
him to fight off infection. She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed the nails of
her curled fingers against her lips. “Damn,” she breathed.

From where he sat huddled on the other side of Teal’c, Aadi narrowed his eyes
at her and repeated the curse softly as if trying it out. Sam was too tired to
bother explaining.

“Perhaps some food,” a soft voice said from beside her, and small, rough
hands lifted the bowl, passed it to someone out of sight.

Sam looked at the woman who settled down next to her. She wasn’t exactly
pretty, Sam decided, or not anymore. She looked hungry, and probably older than
her years. The hair pulled back from her face and escaping from a knot at her
neck was black shot with grey. The same black soot that drifted down over the
whole city had worked into the lines around her eyes and mouth, as though she were a pencil drawing, sketched in haste. Her face was angular, with
prominent cheekbones over hollow cheeks, and her upper lip puckered at the
corner with a scar that curved up along her nose and out to the corner of her
eye. A close call, that one.

The woman raised a hand and laid two fingers on the scar. “My brother,” she
said, and her eyes were pale like the water in the bowl, dully reflecting the
thin light but alert.

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Your brother did that?”

She nodded. “Sebek’s Jaffa, they are often hungry.” Her hand fell and a grim
sort of smile tugged at her lips, made the puckering of the scar more
noticeable. “They like pretty things.”

Sam looked away. “Right.”

She’d heard this story before, on planets scattered so far from each other
they weren’t even pinpricks of light in the sky. Goa’uld appetite was another
galactic constant. She found herself picturing Daniel, wondering if that kind of
hunger—

Her gut twisted sharply and she had to physically scour the thought from her
brain with a scrubbing fist at her temple. When she opened her eyes, the woman
was watching her closely, knowingly, and Sam felt an unreasonable flare of anger
at the thought of this stranger thinking about Daniel like that. But the knowing
look softened a fraction to something a little like sympathy, making the scar
twitch on the woman’s cheek, and Sam’s anger faded. She was too tired for that
kind of anger. There were more practical things to be angry about.

Focus.

The room was crowded now. While she had been tending to Teal’c, several
others had arrived like gloom coalescing in the corners. Now they were hovering
silently against the walls. Like the woman, they were thin angles of hunger,
sketchy suggestions of people. The one nearest Sam had his feet wrapped in fags
and tied round with twine, but the rest were barefoot, and even in her boots,
Sam’s own toes were a little numbed by cold. The men shuffled constantly in the
shadows, taking turns near the tin-can stove and the warm brick hearth. While
she worked, she’d kept track from the corner of her eye and now she placed the
room’s occupants on the mental map in her head: nine in the narrow, low-ceilinged room, plus the
woman, who was still watching her attentively. There were three men between Sam
and the doorway. She had one hand on the
zat
beside her, for all the good
that would do against these people, except that, really, they didn’t look like
they’d put up much resistance, even if she’d gone for them hand-to-hand. But
Teal’c was heavy, and there was no way she’d be able to heave him out of here
unless he were conscious and helping. She scanned the men in the room and
wondered which one was the brother with the knife.

“What’s your name?” she asked the woman.

“Brenneka.” With a nod toward Aadi, who was still crouched at Teal’c’s head,
hands tucked up inside his shirt and eyes rodent bright, she smiled again. “That
one calls me Bren, though I tell him I will wear his skin for shoes.”

Aadi’s grin was wide and he bounced a little as he nodded his head. “Have to
catch me first,” he answered in a sort of toneless sing-song that said this was
a game they’d played many times before.

“Not so easy these days,” Brenneka admitted with faintly amused
disappointment. “He’s mostly legs and big feet, like his father, my brother.”

Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Aris Boch is your brother?” Involuntarily, her hand
came up and she pointed a finger at Brenneka’s scarred face.

“Yes, but not that one. Sebek killed that brother three days ago, at the
vault.” Her face was hard, smeared with grit and shadow.

“Oh.” A small part of Sam relaxed, and she felt a little less nervous about
the men at her back. “I’m sorry.”

With a shrug that said that sympathy was useless, Brenneka looked at Teal’c,
tilting her head pensively for a moment and then reaching out to trace the edge
of his tattoo with a tentative finger. Sam’s hand tightened around the
zat
while she wished again for her Beretta.

“Are you sure about him?” Brenneka asked.

“Of course.”

She turned back to Sam, a frown notched between her brows.

“The Jaffa are followers, like insects, each one with its job, its place.
Drones.”

“That’s not true of Teal’c.”

Brenneka didn’t look convinced.

Sam leaned in to lay a hand on Teal’c’s forehead, displacing Brenneka’s. His
skin was hot. “Teal’c has raised armies to fight the Goa’uld and free the Jaffa
from enslavement.” She decided she’d give a lot for aspirin right then. The last
thing he needed was a fever. “You know, maybe you have more in common with them
than you think.”

A hiss of dissent ran through the room, half-suppressed curses escaping
between teeth. Only Brenneka voiced hers aloud and punctuated it by spitting
onto the bricks around the little stove. “In common.” The scar twitched as she
curled her lip derisively. “We’re the broken bones. The Jaffa break us.”

“And the Goa’uld break them,” Sam said.

“Good.” Brenneka struggled to her feet, then shoved her way through the small
crowd and out into the thin, grey light. The men murmured their agreement and
one by one drifted away like dispersing fog. In the corner, the coals in the
tin-can stove glowed dully and cast no shadows.

Sam zipped her jacket up to her neck and crawled closer to Teal’c, settling
herself against the wall beside his shoulder, the
zat
on her lap. She
could always use it as a club, she figured. And it would work on Jaffa, still.
On the other side of Teal’c, Aadi squatted with his legs and arms pulled inside
his long shirt and watched her with pale, dimly curious eyes.

“What did she mean, when she said your dad thought we’d be worth something?”
she demanded.

He pulled a hand out from inside his sleeve and chewed his thumb for a
moment. “Maybe trade you,” he answered finally. “Maybe use you.”

“Use us for what?”

He shrugged that shrug again, and Sam had to count in multiples of seven
until the urge to
zat
him went away.
Insolence,
she thought wryly,
as she leaned forward and pulled Teal’c’s jacket closed and zipped it up. He murmured something and her hands hovered unmoving over
him while she waited for more, but he settled again into stillness. The wash of
sunlight across his face faded slowly and brightened again as clouds shuffled
and parted for a moment. Then the light went out for good, and a sudden rain
drummed heavily on the tin roof of the shelter. She could hear feet splashing in
the mud outside, a few distant shouts, and one closer before a tarp was pulled
down across the latticework. It blocked out the rain and left them in a
shifting, watery darkness warmed by the glow of the coals and the dim square of
daylight that shone through the plastic sheeting that served as a door.

Aadi shuffled around like a dog turning in his bed and hunched deeper into
himself, dropping his head onto his folded arms on his knees. Sam let her head
fall back against the crumbling brick of the wall and tried to get her bearings.
It wasn’t easy; the rain seemed to hollow out her head and leave nothing but
throbbing behind. Raising a hand to her temple, she winced at the tenderness
there and followed it along her cheekbone and around her eye. Probably a hell of
a shiner, she figured, and maybe, since they were so lucky, a bit of a
concussion. She didn’t even bother trying to inventory the bruises she’d earned
falling down a flight of stairs tangled with an armored Jaffa.