06 - Siren Song (23 page)

Jack must have known he was being watched, because he dropped his hands and
followed Sebek’s progress. In the dim ambient light Daniel was close enough that
even without his glasses he could see the red rash left by the ribbon device
there between Jack’s eyebrows, the broken blood vessels a fine webbing on the
skin on either side of his nose and around his bloodshot eyes. Jack rested his
weight on his broken hand and then, with a hiss of pain, sat up again and
cradled it for a second against his chest. Something about the gesture seemed to
clarify the numbness in Daniel’s body—some memory of pain, maybe—and he
could feel his legs again, fully, the weight of the ribbon device on his
dangling hand, the fleeting touch of Sebek’s attention along his limbs as the
bruises on his knee and hip were repaired and erased. Sebek drew his body up
straight.

Jack screwed up his face in that expression that usually preceded a
smart-assed remark and, true to form, said, “Nice impression of a fish on the
bottom of a boat. Not very godlike, though.”

Daniel could feel the rage in the middle of his chest—Sebek’s chest—a
tightening that started under the sternum and spread outward along the muscles
and into his arms, tendons going taut and fingers curling, clenching into a
fist, and if that feeling had a color it would be seething red. His centre of
gravity shifted, his weight moving from his left foot to the right as Sebek
pulled his left arm back and up. There was a sudden release of energy as the arm
and its fist swung down and smashed Jack across the mouth. Daniel felt the give
of muscle and the resistance of teeth and bone before Jack spun away with the force of the blow, and the shifting of weight again in the
follow-through, anger boiling away and leaving behind the oily residue of
satisfaction.

Daniel felt it all, a detailed parsing of his own body, because that was what
Sebek could feel. Sebek enjoyed the violent art of the machine.

His mouth stretched into Sebek’s smile as Jack, knocked onto his shoulder,
rolled to his knees and stood up, using Aris for balance. When Jack turned to
face Sebek, the back of his hand was red with blood from his lip.

“This is godlike,” Sebek said, low and warning. “We are infused with the
power of this place, and we are strong.” A tremor of fear rippled through the
sharpening space of Sebek’s mind. Daniel tried to follow it, but Sebek smoothed
it away.

“Strong enough to hit a guy when he’s down, anyway,” Jack answered, dabbing
his lip with his sleeve.

The satisfaction wilted to disdain as Sebek turned away. Daniel watched Jack
in his peripheral vision while Sebek turned his attention to Aris. Jack leaned
to the side, one hand on Aris’ shoulder, and spat blood onto the floor. No
teeth with it, at least. Daniel wondered what it would feel like to strangle
himself—to strangle his own body. Serve Sebek right.

Sebek’s answer to that was immediate; there would be a price for
insubordination. Daniel shrank back from what Sebek showed him—promised him—a threat, enacted from the twisted wreckage of Daniel’s own memory—Jack
falling—and Sebek’s vision—a snake’s-eye view of a host being taken. Jack’s
contorted face, now, as
no
worked its way between his clenched teeth.
Sebek got that image from Daniel, Daniel’s memory of Jack in Hathor’s bunker,
tied in the cryo-bed while the snake took him. Daniel could
feel
the tusks
as they carved their way into flesh, Sebek’s experience relived time and again,
the slight pressure of resistant skin giving way and then muscle quivering,
resisting but unable to keep him out; the sideways slither around bone, the
sinewy body winding, slick with excreted enzymes, ducking between tendons,
sliding over the points and angles of vertebrae, seeking the way to the brain,
already starting to divide, ganglia extending into the spinal column. Daniel heard
the echo of distant screaming, the host mind recoiling, and that became a
picture, Jack crabwalking backward, scrambling away, away from Sebek, from
Daniel, nowhere to go, and there was no place in Daniel’s memory where Sebek
could have got that image because Jack never crawled in panic like that.
Daniel’s mind had created this from fear, had made that picture out of the
screaming, made Jack crawl, and there was nowhere to go. Sebek would take Jack,
and Daniel would be dead, and there would be no way of stopping him, then.

Inside, Daniel went blank.

When he could see again, they were walking, Jack up front, Aris behind. The
hallway curved to their left, dark beyond ten or fifteen feet or so. Wherever
the light was coming from, it seemed to be rationed, because it faded behind
them and crept ahead of them reluctantly, tantalizingly. Their boots clattered
on the black stone, and echoes ricocheted along the narrow space so that
sometimes it seemed like there was an army in here with them. On either side,
the walls were alive with those still figures, caught midway through their
dances.

Sebek hummed inside with satisfaction as he carried Daniel long between the
murmuring walls, but the purring smoothness was deformed a little, silk folded
around the shape of something underneath. It wasn’t precisely fear, but the
symbols on the wall seemed to vibrate in his head, below the threshold of
understanding, and it was a fine-toothed abrasion of his control. He strode on
faster than the blooming light, pushing them toward… something.

Daniel watched Sebek as he traced a worn path through a list of grievances,
lost opportunities, humiliations, felt the Goa’uld’s anger, his self-righteous
conviction that he deserved more, always more. It was as though the place were
singing in sympathy for his outrage, and each step they took brought Sebek
closer to—
revenge—
fulfillment. Sebek, Daniel realized, believed that
the silence was speaking to him, and the path that started in his failure wound
its way inward, forward, toward promise. Aris was at his back, and Sebek knew
that his hold on the bounty hunter was slight. Again, a shiver of fear, but Sebek crushed it. He was a god. A sudden, grotesque
series of images slid up out of Sebek’s memory and assaulted Daniel: a crying
child, a dead woman, Aris falling under the raining blows of mailed fists. A god
would never fall to a slave. There was no thought of going back without his
prize, no matter what risks were to be faced, or how terribly the place ravaged
his host. And in any case, Sebek had options. With his gold-capped hand, he
reached out and gave Jack a shove.

When Daniel tried to follow the contours of that uneasiness in Sebek, he
found himself looking at the back of Jack’s neck above his collar, the slight
indentation at the base of his skull below the brush of silver-grey hair. He
tried not to, but Sebek kept his eyes on it. Eyes on the prize. Sebek’s threat
was clear. If Daniel didn’t want to feel Sebek’s predatory gaze on the
entry-point in his next host’s body, he’d have to retreat. He didn’t want to
retreat. He was afraid that if he did, he’d lose his way. So he watched the back
of Jack’s neck while Sebek caressed memories of takings, a snake charmer holding
up his darlings in front of an appalled, fascinated audience. That weird,
inside-out metaphor should have made Daniel falter, but Sebek walked steadily
along, his boots on Jack’s shadow.

Sebek shoved Jack again.

This time, Jack was braced for it and, instead of staggering forward, halted
and turned to face Sebek with an irritating expression of calm affability. He
smiled tightly and stepped to the side, sweeping his arm wide to show the way.
“If you’d like to go first, be my guest,” he said, still smiling with his own
threat in his eyes.

“You will continue…” Daniel could feel Sebek searching Daniel’s own
vocabulary. “On point. Aris will watch our six.” That hum of satisfaction keyed
up a bit when Jack’s smile faltered as he heard those familiar words in Daniel’s
warped and unfamiliar voice. Their language, stolen, to make a point. “And we
will move faster.” That agitation in Sebek was a thin whine, and it seemed to
spin out like a ribbon along the hallway, into darkness. “Move.”

Jack pointed ahead of them to where the wall curved away, its lines of
symbols dancing away, luring. “I don’t think faster is necessarily the best
strategy,” he said, as he put his hands in his pockets, and then, wincing, pulled the one with the broken finger out again. “I mean,
didn’t you
see
any of the
Indiana Jones
movies?” Tilting his head
back and cocking a finger gun at Sebek with his splinted hand, he added, “Wait,
I forgot. Of course you didn’t. Take my word for it. Caution is what we learn
from Dr. Jones.”

Impatience prickled along Daniel’s skin as the ribbon of agitation went taut,
urging Sebek forward. But he took a fraction of a second to rummage through
Daniel’s memories again and came up with the image of Indiana Jones running from
a giant rolling boulder, dodging poisoned arrows. Sebek grunted out something
like a laugh. “That is why you are on point, O’Neill,” Sebek answered with a
smile of his own. “If there are traps, you will know about them first.”

Behind them, Aris let out a brief gust of laughter. “Sounds like an excellent
plan. Plus, I didn’t get any lunch, so I’d love to wrap this up as soon as
possible.”

Shrugging, Jack turned around and kept walking, at the exact same pace he’d
set before. “Whatever,” he muttered and then waved an admonishing hand at them
over his shoulder. “But you really should see the movie first, is all I’m
saying.”

Sebek could see it, or at least what Daniel could remember of it, scattered
fragments, lost in the clutter of associations: hot asphalt under his sneakers
reflecting the summer heat into his face as he walked to the theater; Sarah,
reading over his shoulder faster than he was, reaching down and turning the page
of his book to reveal a full-page image of the South American jungle,
impenetrable green and a startle of tropical bird-red at the top of the canopy;
the smell of dust and cobwebs in the ziggurat on P2X-338, a skittering in the
darkness, and the sarcophagus heavy and silent, pried open and empty but for
gnawed bones; the lingering scent of Russian cigarettes, and the bum of vodka in
his throat. Sebek had all this to assimilate, with Daniel’s low-grade annoyance
at the piratical archeology of Indiana Jones and his own feelings of hypocrisy
as the relics of a hundred worlds accumulated in his lab in the mountain and at
Area 51, waiting to be cracked open and—
exploited
- explained.

Sebek watched the settling layers of Daniel’s experience with the bored
attention of someone thumbing through the pages of the phonebook.

“Your friend’s mind is undisciplined,” Sebek said to the back of Jack’s head.

“You should see his office.” Daniel could tell from the sudden,
barely-perceptible flexing of the tendons in the back of Jack’s neck that he
regretted saying that.

Daniel regretted it too, because now Sebek was in his office with Daniel’s
books, his files. Before he could imagine hiding it, the pang of protective
homesickness shot through him, sharpening Sebek’s idle searching. Daniel tried
to focus on miscellany, ritual objects without strategic significance,
requisition forms piled messily on the corner of his desk, the volumes of Budge’s
Egyptology
still on the bookshelf behind a forgotten mug half-full of
stale coffee. But he thought of the way Jack’s neck tensed, belated, the words
already out when Jack, Daniel knew, had sworn not to give the snake an inch, not
a word, and it was like that in Daniel’s head now, where trying not to think
about things that needed protecting only pointed Sebek toward them. The slope of
Jack’s shoulders as he paced ahead of them was the same now as it had been the
day of the summit at the SGC, when the Goa’uld System Lords sat around the
conference table with Thor and debated the best way to—
subjugate—
protect the Earth. On the break, Jack in his dress blues had stood wordlessly in
Daniel’s office, perfectly ironed on the outside and crumpled with fatigue and
frustration on the inside. Daniel knew Jack hated politics. He hated talking. He
hated being the one it was all resting on. Jack had said as much when he’d
hinted it should have been Daniel spinning the whole world on a thread of words
and lies.

Daniel tried to forget the lies. But of course, trying to forget only brought
them to the surface where Sebek snatched at them. The Asgard were besieged in
their own galaxy. The Protected Planets Treaty was based on a bluff. Sebek
laughed out loud.

“Something’s funny?” Aris asked. The “my lord” was conspicuously absent, but
fortunately for him, Sebek was feeling generous and let it slide, keeping his eyes on Jack.

“Your friend is a source of much useful information,” Sebek taunted.

“Oh, he’s full of it, all right,” Jack answered without turning around.

It took Sebek a second to scan Daniel’s store of idioms and appreciate the
double-entendre. “It seems your protectors, the Asgard, are not as powerful as
they purport to be.” Jack slowed to a halt and turned to face him, his face
impassive. Sebek pulled Daniel’s lips into a satisfied smile. “I’m sure Lord Yu
would pay handsomely for this information.”

“I’m sure.” Jack sounded so disinterested that Daniel couldn’t stop himself
from thinking about Yu, crazy Yu, whose host body was beginning to deteriorate.
Soon he wouldn’t be able to keep his host alive, and he would no longer be a
threat to anyone. Sebek seized that idea, turned it around in triumph. Now was
the time to strike, and once Sebek had acquired the appropriate weapons, he
would dispose of his infirm master. Daniel’s despair deepened.

“Yes, your friend is useful. He gives up easily.” Sebek waved Jack on, an
implied order to get moving.

Ignoring Sebek’s command, Jack narrowed his eyes at him. “I doubt that.” His
expression softened into mock pity and he added, “He can be a real pain in the
ass.
I
wouldn’t want to be stuck in there with him.” The softness hardened again
into serious lines and planes of shadow. “But if he’s so useful, you might want
to treat him nicely.” The threat was implicit, and ironic: Jack could kill Sebek, but he’d have to come through Daniel first—literally.