06 - Siren Song (35 page)

But they were. Progress. She had to admit that, in spite of the blisters
blooming on her palms, and the aching of her bruised back, it felt good to
do
something, finally, and it made a lot of sense to go
under
the
ha’tak
instead of around it. No Jaffa patrols to dodge, no craven
city-dwellers to turn them in. As she settled into the rhythm and adjusted her
breathing, stretched her arms and flexed her muscles, she let herself fall away
from doubt for a few minutes, allowed herself to forget to think ahead, to look
only as far as the darkness at the bow of the boat and to think only of keeping
the tension up on the rope as she reached for another yard of progress.

It was only a temporary indulgence, but when Aadi touched her shoulder and
took her place, her mind was a little clearer. She found a space between Eche
and Behn on the bottom of the boat, and set herself to the task of deploying her
resources in her head, Teal’c on point, herself on their six with the knife and
the
zat.
They’d use the stun grenades only as a last resort. Those would
likely be key to any exit strategy that would involve a dash for the ’gate.

But the period of clarity wouldn’t last, she knew. She could already feel it,
that agitation at the base of her skull and a prickle along her arms like ants
scurrying inside her bones, and the well-made plans started to fall apart in her
head, too reckless, too risky. She had to force her mouth open a little and put
her tongue between her teeth to keep them from grinding. And the nausea was
back, too, made worse by the lurch-and-stop of the boat as it labored against
the current.

Beside her, Teal’c shifted uncomfortably. “We must be nearing the mine,” he
observed.

“Yeah. I feel it, too.” Craning her neck to look back at Hamel in the stern,
she asked, “You people don’t feel anything when you get close to the vault?”

Hamel shook his head, and Sam could see the others do the same. “This is why
Sebek sent us into that section of the mine, to try to dig around the door. This is how Brenneka’s brother—not Aris, the
other one—learned of the sacred writing there. But Sebek was impatient, and he
finally came himself, and when Ky wouldn’t tell him what the writing said, he
killed him.”

“Ky could read the writing of the Nitori?” Sam asked.

“No, of course not. No one can.”

“Sebek would not accept excuses,” Teal’c said.

“No.”

“He killed him with the light in his hand.” Aadi’s words were muffled as he
leaned forward to reach for the rope. “He wouldn’t let me and Bren take Ky home
or bury him. He’s still there, in the mine, right where he died. People have to
step over him to get to work. They’re afraid to touch him because of Sebek.”

The hatred in his voice was palpable. A whisper scurried along the tunnel and
back again as the crew cursed in unison and snapped the Goa’uld’s neck between
their fingers. Even Frey and Aadi paused in their work to do it, leaving Teal’c
to keep the boat from backsliding in the current.

Hamel nudged Sam’s thigh with his toe. “Will you be able to fight, like this,
when you’re sick from the place?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, we will.” She resisted the urge to scrub at her
hair, dislodge the imaginary ants on her skin. “Just follow my orders and we’ll
be okay.”

Hamel looked a little skeptical, but he nodded. “Maybe your friend will help
us. If he is what you say he is.”

“Maybe.”

She turned back and stared at the dark walls passing inches away. It felt as
though she were the boat, and the rope dragging her forward was invisible,
twisted in her ribs. If she closed her eyes she could see it, tight and urgent,
yanking her unevenly toward the vault. It wasn’t just the need to get to Daniel
and the Colonel, either, but something undefined and insistent, like a craving,
like thirst. In her mind’s eye, Daniel and the Colonel were pushed to the
periphery of her vision and the rope carried on beyond them into darkness.
Something was waiting.

But when she tried to focus on it, there was a stirring at the back of her neck, in her throat, her brain, that familiar, alien coiling
claiming her. She could feel it cutting the ties between herself and her body.
Jolinar had taken her roughly, and the threads had been sliced clean through.

“No,” she murmured under her breath.

Not sliced clean through. Sam had remained herself. She’d gotten to be
herself again. It had been only temporary, and Jolinar had forced her only
because she’d been desperate. That’s what made all the difference.

Only it didn’t, not where the
feeling
was concerned. She covered her
mouth with her hand.
Forget this. It’s a distraction. Focus.
In the
distance, she could make out the shape of something, someone, waiting for them.
She wanted to see the face. But what she kept coming up with was Jolinar looking
at her in the mirror, using Sam’s eyes.

“Nearly there,” Hamel announced in a whisper.

Teal’c was watching her, one hand gripping the rope, the other ghosting over
the bandage under his coat.

“Okay?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Here.” Hamel shook the light stick, and it guttered and went out.

Instead of total darkness, though, there was a tentative yellow light ahead,
enough to show them that the wall on their right was broken by an intersecting
tunnel. A few more pulls on the rope brought them to the edge of a sloped
landing, where the narrow passage opened up into a small lagoon. After nosing
the boat forward until there was enough of the prow exposed to allow them to
crawl out, Frey held it steady while Hamel anchored it to a loop of wire in the
wall. Water lapped against the hollow sides until the men let go and the boat
turned into the current and stilled in the pull.

Crouching next to Teal’c at the mouth of the tunnel, Sam peered up into the
shifting light. Torches, still a good twenty, thirty feet away in another
cross-passage. No sound except the thudding of the crushers, more a shudder in
the chest than a noise. She wondered how close they were to the active sections
of the mine. Had to be pretty close if someone bothered to leave the lights on.

When Hamel crawled up beside her, she leaned close to his ear. He smelled
like the river—empty, cold. “How far and how many?”

He nodded toward the light. “This place is well-hidden. Jaffa don’t come this
way.” He paused to chew the edge of his stubbly beard. “Usually.”

“Then who left the torches?” Teal’c asked without moving his eyes from the
tunnel.

“The Order. Word must have spread.”

Sam wondered if that was good news or bad. “Any chance there’s more up there
willing to fight?”

“Not much. But they won’t interfere.” Again, that pause. “I don’t think.”

“Just as well,” Sam conceded, her voice pitched low as she rose and motioned
Teal’c ahead of her. Fewer people to worry about.

Hurrying to keep up with Teal’c, Aadi kept his zat closed and clutched close
to his chest. Rebnet followed his lead.

Behn startled her by clapping her on the shoulder as he passed by. “Now we
kill Jaffa,” he said with a satisfied grin made more than a little ghoulish by
the shifting light.

“Not until I say so,” she reminded him.

With identical grunts of assent, Frey and Hamel followed, but Eche hung back,
hesitating. His usually pale eyes were wide and dark. His tongue passed
nervously over his cracked lip.

“Someone should stay with the boat,” Sam said.

The relief made him seem a little boneless as he nodded.

Sam squeezed his skinny arm and smiled. “Get back inside it and keep low.
Play out the rope until you’re in the dark. We won’t be too long, I hope.”

He nodded again, smiled wanly, part gratitude, part apology. At the top of
the slope where the rest were waiting for her at the mouth of the intersecting
tunnel, she turned back, but Eche was gone, and so was the boat. She didn’t
pause for long. The rope anchored in her ribs yanked her forward.

“Let’s go,” she ordered, and they were moving.

The torches were jammed at irregular intervals into crevices along the new
tunnel, leaving long swaths of darkness between them. Hamel urged the group
forward at a pace that Sam would have thought imprudent if she hadn’t actually
felt like
running
toward the vault. She set a part of her mind to work on
that problem, the how and why of it. The rest of her attention remained focused
on any dark patch large enough to hide a Jaffa.

But there were no Jaffa. At least not in this tunnel. The next one, though,
was a problem.

There were three at the intersection, one in a crocodile helmet. From where
she crouched in the shelter of the corner, she could hear their voices—one
mechanical and echoing—but not what they were saying. She arched an eyebrow at
Teal’c, who, standing over her, edged his face an inch around the corner so he
could see.

“A disturbance in the city,” he breathed, his lips hardly moving as he leaned
back and bowed low next to her ear. “They do not know of what nature.”

“Okay, maybe good.” Then, she twisted on her heel to pull Hamel closer. “How
close to the vault are we?”

“Very near. Up there,” he hooked a bony finger past the guards, “and down a
short passage.”

“More Jaffa, probably, then.”

He nodded.

Behn hissed between his teeth, and Frey cuffed him in the ear. Rebnet shushed
them both and Frey cuffed him, too. Behind them, Aadi stood silently, his eyes
glittering, watching Sam closely.

She turned back and studied the guards. The one with the helmet was the
priority; they needed to blind the other Jaffa, stop them from sending backup.
She was giving the “go” signal to Teal’c when the sound of boots—lots of boots—in the tunnel made him pull back and flatten himself against the wall. She
held out an arm to stop the others as if she were a mother in the driver’s seat
protecting her kids from a sudden stop.

Six more Jaffa came around the corner.

Sam cursed in her head. Frey cursed out loud, and this time it was Behn doing
the cuffing. A guard at the edge of the now-sizable crowd turned his head toward the sound, and Sam knocked her temple
against Teal’c’s knee when she ducked back around the corner. They waited. She
pulled the knife from her belt and rose to the balls of her feet, nipped the
blade in her palm so it was aimed down in her fist. She would have to go for the
throat, above the cowl, or the seam where the chainmail shirt came together with
buckles under the arm. Footsteps came closer as the augmented voice of the
helmeted Jaffa rose and rattled around in the narrow space, echoes on echoes,
giving orders that all seemed to be depressingly about standing between Sam and
the vault. Teal’c was perfectly still. Hamel’s fingers stretched out, curled
around the
zat,
stretched again. Even in the dim light she could see that
his knuckles were white when they finally closed in a tight fist around the
weapon. Frey’s breathing whistled softly in his chest. The others didn’t seem to
be breathing at all.

Boots scraped on the stone a couple of feet away. In her mind’s eye she could
see the intersection clearly, all of the Jaffa facing the one with the helmet,
away from their hiding spot. If this one came around the corner, maybe they
could take him down quietly, gain a little time. Going back wasn’t an option.
Even the hint of that thought made the rope knotted under her ribs jerk
insistently. She caught her group with a meaningful glance and laid her finger
over her lips. A Jaffa-shaped shadow slithered up the opposite wall. She held
her breath.

The explosion was muffled by the stone of the mountain, putting it somewhere
up near the surface, but it had enough force to make the guard stumble. His
bracing hand gripped the corner right beside Teal’c’s face. Aadi dropped to his
knees, shoulders hunched against a stream of dust and small stones that rained
from the ceiling, and Frey hunched over him, deflecting the debris with his
back. Sam covered her mouth and nose against the dust while the ground rose up;
once, and settled heavily as the shock-wave passed. Some part of her hoped that
this wasn’t a fluke, but she had no reason to believe it. Still, it was a nice
coincidence. The timing was impeccable.

In the silence that followed, it took her a second to realize that the pounding of the crushers was gone. Someone had blown the plant, she
guessed, and the naquadah in the ore had added a hell of a kick to the bomb. If
she was right, they’d be damn lucky if half the mountain didn’t come down on
their heads, or worse. But, if there was any luck left in the universe after
they’d used up all that credit, the explosion would make a really nifty
diversion.

To prove that the universe wasn’t quite as perverse and annoying as she’d
begun to suspect, the shouting started, followed by a booted exodus of Jaffa in
the direction of the mine entrance. She raised her eyebrows at Teal’c, and he
leaned a quarter inch around the corner, raising one finger at her. Sam did a
silent cheer.

She raised three fingers and lowered them one at a time, counting down. On
three, she stepped across the narrow side tunnel to the opposite wall, getting a
good view of the intersection as Teal’c lunged around the corner, fell to one
knee with the staff level and crackling. But the lone Jaffa was looking the
other way and only turned at the sound of Sam’s
zat
whining open. By then
it was too late for him, and he collapsed with the clank of armor on stone. Sam
keyed the
zat
a third time and his body disappeared. Through the soles of
her boots, she could feel the tingle of the dissipating charge.

. Just as she was waving the rest of the crew forward the wall beside her
head exploded under the impact of a staff blast, sending slivers of molten stone
into her hair and the skin at the back of her neck. With a shout, she dropped to
the floor, discarding her
zat
and the knife to bat the shrapnel away with
her hands. Thankfully, her jacket took the worst of it, but she could feel the
peppering of tiny burns, hissed as her fingers closed on one larger piece of
heated stone and flicked it away. Then Teal’c was stepping in front of her,
shoving her back into the wall hard enough for her shoulder to crunch and her
teeth to snap down on her tongue. Crouched behind him, she couldn’t see what was
happening, but she could hear
zat
fire and Behn’s voice, a wild, crowing
laugh.