06 - Siren Song (33 page)

Esa leaned around Teal’c with a wary glance at the
zat
and nodded at
Sam. Like the rest of them, he was soaked, and his clinging shirt showed an
impressive bulk of muscle on his squat figure. He wiped water out of his eyes
with a thick-fingered hand and continued up over his knobby bald head in a
gesture that reminded Sam of Hammond.

“You’ll need this,” he told Hamel. In his other hand was the gleam of a small
key.

Several scenarios in rapid succession ran through Sam’s head to explain how
Esa might have gotten Brenneka’s key, and some of them weren’t pretty. “How?”
she asked.

He kept his eyes on Hamel as he answered. “It’s not right to break into our
own house. Even Brenneka understands that.”

“She gave you the key.” Sam pondered the implications of even this minimal
change of heart.

Esa jerked his chin at the door and gave no other answer. Then, without a
word, he took the lantern from Hamel, turned, and was gone. Sam tried not to
begrudge the loss of all that useful muscle, but a survey of the huddled shadows
of the remaining troops made that a little hard.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, watching Esa’s lumbering shape until it was
swallowed by darkness and rain.

A moment later the rest of them were winding down the staircase, her boots
and Teal’c’s ringing on the stone steps, everyone else cat-quiet and ghostly in
the cold blue of the flash Brenneka had used on their first trip down here. The
steps were slick from the water dripping off all of them, and she was certain
that the chattering of her teeth was audible over the racket of their climbing.
Ahead of her, Aadi’s shivering shoulders were up as high as his ears,
goose-bumps like plucked chicken-skin on his bare neck. Behind her, Teal’c was a
moving wall of cold. She wondered again about fever and then put that aside for
now. He’d know what he needed, and his inside pockets were bulging with all the
meds from the stolen packs, along with his tretonin injector. Soon, hopefully,
he’d be back at the mountain, with Janet hovering over him and pointing out,
with the resignation peculiar to armed forces doctors, that it was pretty stupid
to go running around in the rain with a crispy hole in his side.

Once in the cavern, Hamel brought up the lights in the sconces and crossed
the wide floor, detouring around the dais and finally kneeling at the foot of
the scored wall of Ancient metal. His hands smoothing over the surface, up, out
as far as he could reach, up again, he muttered something she couldn’t make out—that jump-rope cadence again—and a panel about five feet across popped
outward and slid aside with the hissing resistance of hydraulics.

When Hamel twisted to look at her over his shoulder, his face was wrinkled up
with a wide smile. “Your weapons,” he said, “and a few other things.”

That was a nice understatement. The “few other things” turned out to be a small arsenal. Sam crouched to peer inside, her hand steadying
her on the upper edge of the door. She could make out a narrow crawlspace
extending beyond the reach of the light stick. In neat rows along both walls
were
zats
and staff weapons, the former hanging from a rail, the latter
leaning at a steep angle between pegs. A quick count of what she could see came
up with at least twenty staffs and twice as many
zats.
In a tidy row in
the middle of the floor sat four spherical Goa’uld stun grenades and, beside
them, an equal number of incendiary ones. Little Bangs and Big Bangs. Excellent.

Raising her eyebrows in surprise, she gave Hamel her best hundred-watt smile.
“Not bad,” she admitted, deciding she’d better revise her first impression of
these people and their whipped-dog passivity. “How did you manage this?” It was
unlikely that missing weapons would be overlooked by Jaffa. She’d seen whole
villages razed for less significant offenses.

Hamel was gazing into the crawlspace with an expression usually reserved for
religious relics. “The mine collapses, Jaffa die. Small people can wriggle into
small spaces, bring back things thought lost.” He looked at Aadi, who grinned
proudly. Apparently, he was good at snagging more than rats for dinner. “The
rest, mostly from Aris, smuggled on his ship from his outworld trips. Some,
though, have been here for many years.” With a grunt, he moved into the storage
space on his knees—a ragged petitioner, Sam thought—and started to hand out
the weapons. “Some sit and pray—”

“And some meet the god on the road,” Teal’c finished for him, earning a
rough, phlegmy laugh in return.

In the end, they decided that only Teal’c would carry a staff, since he was
the only one able to use it effectively, both for firing and close-quarters
fighting. The rest took
zats—
even Aadi, after Teal’c had made a case
for him and Sam caved against her better judgment. In addition to her
zat,
Sam stuffed a stun grenade in one pocket of her jacket and an incendiary one
in the other, adding two to Teal’c’s as well. It was an ungainly arrangement,
the grenades inhibiting forward movement of their arms, but the benefits would
probably outweigh the disadvantages.

They spared a few minutes to do the fastest small arms training ever, with only one small setback when one of the troops, Eche, the youngest
after Aadi, accidentally
zatted
himself. Predictably, it didn’t have any
effect, except that the look of surprise and then embarrassment on his thin face
was a real keeper. Once Behn and the other two, Rebnet and Frey, had stopped
falling over themselves laughing, they’d taken turns
zatting
each other.
When they lost track of who’d shot whom, Sam learned a useful lesson: two
zats
would kill a normal person, while the average Atroposian was impervious
if the
zats
were spaced more than a couple seconds apart. However, two
zats
delivered in rapid succession
would
actually drop an Atroposian
like a bag of rocks, leaving the target semi-conscious for about half a minute.
While they waited for the gang to lean Frey up against the wall to administer
increasingly forceful smacks to the side of his face until he came to with a
snarl and swatting hands, she and Teal’c decided that this explained why the
Jaffa bothered to carry
zats
at all, given these people’s resistance to
Goa’uld technology. They tabled speculation about what three shots would do,
although continued snickering from the four stooges made her pretty tempted to
experiment.

Aadi, at least, wasn’t too impressed and sulked against the dais, opening and
closing his
zat
with mechanical regularity until Teal’c walked over and
laid a heavy hand on the top of his head.

The troops armed, Hamel slid the door back over the hidey-hole and set off,
not, as Sam had expected, in the direction of the stairs, but to the right of
the Ancient wall. They descended deeper into the cavern, to where the light
thinned from more distantly separated sconces and the elaborate mosaic on the
floor gave way first to intermittent patches and then to plain, black stone. At
this point, the vaulted ceiling angled sharply downward so that the cavern
became a sloping tunnel with a broad entrance like a half-opened mouth. It
seemed to sigh out the distant whisper of rushing water on a heavy, cold breath.
In here, there were no sconces at all. Hamel shook his light stick again, but
the blue glow did nothing except to make the darkness within seem more
impenetrable.

Gathered close around Hamel as though the light were an island and the
darkness a dangerous sea, the gang shuffled silently, their eyes wide, fingers clenched white-knuckled around the grips of the
zats.
Teal’c raised an eyebrow at Sam. Shrugging, she stepped out of the circle
into blackness, then reached back to take the light from Hamel. She didn’t
actually say
abandon all hope
out loud as, with varying degrees of
reluctance, her tiny army trailed along behind her, downward into the belly of
the beast.

Sleep hovered around Aris, inviting him into its seductive embrace. He pushed
it away. He’d gone longer stretches without sleep before. Besides, he had to
stay alert enough keep up with O’Neill. Deep lines of fatigue were etched across
O’Neill’s face, but that kind of exhaustion could be overcome by a soldier. Aris
would have staked his few possessions on the certainty that O’Neill could endure
days without sleep on strength of will alone. He knew the type. Times like this,
Aris had reason to appreciate the
roshna;
double doses kept him on his
feet, but he was running low, and he’d have to cut back soon. He made fists,
then relaxed them as his hands jittered and trembled, uncontrolled.

Sebek led their little procession now, a departure from how it had been since
they entered the maze. They were following a hallucination, or maybe they
weren’t. The shimmering woman appeared and disappeared at intervals, leaving
them to find their own way, and all three of them were frustrated. Every so
often Sebek stopped and pointed, speaking softly to O’Neill, whose posture was
still as wary as ever as he listened and responded. Aris watched Sebek’s intent
stare, the way his body moved, and tried to figure out how O’Neill could think
that this was Daniel Jackson. The Goa’uld were good mimics—they got away with
pretending all the time. He regretted losing control before, giving O’Neill a
reason to align himself—even tentatively—with this other man, whoever he
might be. It wasn’t impossible, not by any means, that O’Neill had picked up on
something, some irrefutable sign, that this really was his friend. Aris had seen
too many host bodies give out near this place, too many jumps from host to host,
to think the Goa’uld had complete control. Even so, he was having trouble
telling the difference between the interests of the two entities. That wasn’t
something he would share with O’Neill. His plan and O’Neill’s plan didn’t need to match up. They’d
work it out whenever they found their way to a stopping point. Then Aris would
make up his own mind about Dr. Jackson, and whether or not he would have to go
through Jackson to get to Sebek. The idea didn’t appeal to him, but he’d do it.

What bothered him most was that he’d been sure O’Neill was on the same page,
until he’d stepped in front of Aris’ intent. He didn’t like the idea of killing
O’Neill, but he’d do that, too, if he had to. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Jack.” No deep reverberation; the symbiote was pretending to be the host
again. Or maybe not. For the moment, Aris chose to think of that voice as
belonging to Daniel Jackson. He might be proven wrong later, but it didn’t
matter much at this point. Jackson was swaying, his lips parted, head tilted
back as if he was listening to something Aris couldn’t hear. “Do you sense
anything?”

O’Neill stopped and raised his hands to his head as if to block out sound and
light, a gesture Aris was becoming familiar with. “Maybe.”

“You do,” Jackson said, sounding a little too excited for Aris’ taste. He
moved to touch O’Neill on the shoulder, but O’Neill shied away like a skittish
animal, and Jackson dropped his hand. “Is it what you saw before?”

“No. I don’t know.” O’Neill hesitated, then shook his head violently. “No.”

“Something else?”

“Why does it matter?” There was an angry, suspicious edge to O’Neill’s voice
as he pushed back against Jackson’s curiosity, and Aris watched Jackson
carefully for signs of the Goa’uld emerging, but he saw nothing but a
sympathetic look on Jackson’s face. “You want a running commentary?” O’Neill
snapped. “Everything that flies through my head?”

“No. But some of it might be important. Especially since you haven’t been
touching the walls.” Jackson stared at O’Neill, until O’Neill nodded curtly.
Aris’ eyes narrowed. Maybe it really was Jackson; in the way of friends who’d
become accustomed to speaking without words, O’Neill seemed to be catching on to
something Aris was missing. It was an interesting trick, but he’d never worked with
anyone long enough to develop it.

O’Neill turned away toward the wall and leaned forward as if to rest his
forehead against the cool stone, but jerked away at the last second. “I’m not
going to activate anything by touching this, am I?”

“No symbols,” Jackson said. “No danger. Not that I can tell, anyway.”

“That’s reassuring,” O’Neill said, irony thick in his tone. His head dropped
forward and he leaned there, at an angle to the wall, a solid, tilted line of
tension. “Some of it’s inside my head, and some of it’s not,” he said, his voice
muffled. “Stuff I’ve seen, stuff I’ve… done. Memories popping out of nowhere.
You don’t need me to tell you about those.”

“Are you sure?” Jackson’s voice was soft.

O’Neill’s shoulders tensed. “Yeah.”

“Then what else?”

“Stars. Patterns of stars, I guess… I’m not sure. Like star fields. Maps,
maybe.”

“Of this galaxy?” Aris asked. Jackson’s intent gaze shifted to him. “Hey,
just asking. There has to be some point to this place, remember?”

Jackson nodded. “Can you tell, Jack?”

Aris had his own doubts about whether the human could even tell one star from
another, but a moment later O’Neill said, “There aren’t any constellations I
recognize.”

“Huh.” Jackson bit at his lip and his gaze grew unfocused.

“You planning to share or do I get to be the only one on the hot seat?”
O’Neill demanded gruffly.

As if deciding whether or not to answer, Jackson glared at Aris and then said
slowly, “My memories of Sha’re, at first, but other things, too. Almost anything
triggers them, and I can’t stop Sebek from running off after them. He collects
them like…” Jackson’s voice trailed off, then resumed, stronger. “Some of the
images are so vivid, it’s as though I’m watching a movie, or reliving it.”
Jackson lifted his arms and crossed them over his chest. “Sometimes, I can tell I’m reliving the sensation of being ascended.”