06 - Siren Song (3 page)

“Or not,” Jack said.

“No, that was reliable intelligence,” Daniel said. “In fact, other Goa’uld
believed it to be true. Yu didn’t contradict me, when I mentioned it.”

“While you were his slave?” Jack raised his eyebrows. “You and Yu had a lot
of these little conversations?”

“A few,” Daniel said, raising his eyebrows back. “Sebek was never one of the
big players, I don’t think. But I could be wrong. There’s still stuff—” He
fluttered his fingers next to his temple. “—missing.”

“That’s inconvenient,” Jack observed and, ignoring Daniel’s half-pained,
half-pissed expression, turned to Teal’c. “T? You heard of this one?”

“There are many minor Goa’uld in service to the system lords, and many
planets to be administered.”

“Administered.” Aris’ voice crackled over the intercom, brittle with irony
and anger. “Right. That’s what he’s doing, administering.” The intercom clicked
off.

Slumping down next to Jack, Daniel leaned his head back against the wall and
stared into the middle distance. The brain was working. Jack could practically
see him feel around the edges of the gaps in his memory. He looked away.

More sparks showered out of the control panel, and Carter jumped back and did
a few more tight circles before shifting crystals around again.

Teal’c closed his eyes and was quiet, resting while somehow remaining alert,
waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Not for the first time, he
reminded Jack of fire, banked low and hot in the centre.

Jack drummed on his knees. “Slo-ow motion Wa-alter,” he sang under his
breath. “That fire engine gu-uy.”

By Sam’s watch, they’d been in the cargo hold for a little over eighteen
hours. The Colonel and Daniel had “I-spied” every single item in the room—which
wasn’t much, besides a couple of empty storage cases and themselves—but when
Daniel had started with “I spy with my little eye something that means ‘gift of
the Nile’,” the Colonel had gotten testy and made a new rule outlawing the
hieroglyphics in Goa’uld
tel’tak
wallpaper. After that, the game had
deteriorated into an argument regarding the relative cultural value of
Hammurabi’s Code and
The Simpsons,
and she exchanged a quick glance with
Teal’c to make sure he’d be ready to move if they had to intervene and wrestle
the two of them to their separate corners. Eventually a remarkable detente was
forged over the structural similarities of strip comics and petroglyphs, and Sam
dropped her head against Teal’c’s shoulder and let herself slip into a shallow
doze. In her dream, the stars were stretched in long, solid bars, rainbowed as
their light passed through the prism of hyperspace, and the
tel’tak
rode along those rails toward some distant point of blackness.

Falling into the gravity well, she woke with a jerk. Daniel was watching her.

“Bad dream?”

She shook her head, then rolled her shoulders, wincing as her spine crackled.
Beside her, Teal’c was asleep sitting up. The Colonel was over next to Daniel,
on his back, his cap over his eyes.

She braced a hand against the wall and levered herself up. One step over
Daniel’s legs took her to the tiny bathroom—at least Aris had left them with
facilities, and she even had some water in her canteen. Their kits and all of
their gear, including the rest of the water and the MREs, were in the forward
compartment with him. The toilet had no tank and used some kind of chemicals in
any case, and there was no sink in there, either. No use in thinking about their
out-of-reach canteens, so she returned to the cargo hold and, with a pat on
Daniel’s shoulder, went back to fiddling with the door control panel.

After a few minutes, Daniel came and stood next to Sam, arms folded across
his chest. He leaned forward to look around the panel door. “Not making much
progress here,” he observed quietly.

“Actually, I think he’s got the system completely cut off from this side,”
she said.

“But the sparks—”

“Mostly for show, to string me along.” She switched a blue crystal for a red
one with the same lack of results she got the last time she’d tried that. “And
to tick me off.”

“If you know he’s got it rigged so it can’t be accessed at all from in here,
why have you spent the last day working on it?”

With another shrug, she pulled out the red chip and replaced it with a clear
one. “Because if he rigged it, he must have rigged it
somehow,
and if I
can figure that out, maybe I can get around it.” A little more fruitless
twiddling, and she added, “And besides—”

“It gives you something to do.”

“I never was good at ‘I Spy’.”

“Nor was I,” Teal’c said softly. He rose and rolled his shoulders. Then he
stepped to the middle of the room and began to work his way through the fluid poses of a training exercise, loosening muscles
stiff with waiting. Sam paused in her work for a little while to watch him and
marveled at how deadliness could look so beautiful. Daniel watched, too, his
face falling into lines of concentration, his eyes becoming more and more
distant, as though Teal’c’s orderly gestures were a part Daniel’s own mental
exercise, a physical mantra that led Daniel inward. Sam watched him watch Teal’c
and resisted the urge to smooth the frown from his forehead.

Finally, as Teal’c came to the end of the sequence and began again, she
turned back to the crystals with a sigh. Blue, clear, red, green. If she had a
screwdriver she could pull the whole housing out of the wall, and then she’d be
getting somewhere, maybe. Over the hum of the hyperspace engines, she could hear
Teal’c’s measured breathing. Blue, clear, red, green. The Colonel slept,
rationing resources. Daniel explored the inside of his head, on the trail of
details about Sebek, things he’d known in another life. The cargo hold seemed
charged with potential energy, stored up, going nowhere. Or somewhere.

When Daniel spoke, his soft voice made her jump. “You know,” he ventured
tentatively, “we
could
let him take us where he wants and maybe see if we
actually
can
help.”

“Go where Aris Boch wants us to go? I don’t think that will sit well with the
Colonel.”

“Aris said that there are people in danger. Keeping the Goa’uld from killing
people isn’t such a bad thing.”

“You’re assuming we can believe a single thing he says.” She was tempted to
start prying at the housing again, but her fingertips were still a little numb
from the last time, so she settled for glaring at the panel. “I’m not sure I
want to stake my life on it.”

He looked at his boots, his jaw set. “We know his people are oppressed.”

“Most of the galaxy is oppressed.”

“That’s the tricky part, isn’t it?”

She fumbled the crystal she was holding and caught it against her stomach. In
the center of the room, Teal’c stopped moving and became an attentive stroke of
darker space at the fringes of her vision.

Daniel went on, “How do you decide what… who… is worth dying for?”

“You tell me,” she demanded before she could stop herself. Sam felt a sudden
anger expanding inside her chest, making her throat bum.

Daniel’s wince put the fire out fast. More than a little appalled at herself,
she closed her eyes and tried not to think of First Minister Dreylock and her
denial of Kelownan culpability in the accident that had taken Daniel’s life.
Dreylock had made Daniel into a criminal. And
that
was a crime.

As if he were the rebellious voice in her head, Teal’c said, “Some neither
appreciate nor seem to deserve such sacrifice.”

Daniel looked at him, and, after a moment of consideration, straightened from
the wall. “People are people. Appreciation isn’t the point. You don’t ask for
the appreciation of the Jaffa when you fight for them. You don’t ignore their
oppression because they’re undeserving. You believe in their freedom, even if
some of
them
don’t.”

Sam looked from Teal’c to Daniel and back again. Teal’c had a point; the
smaller, meaner part of her came back to Dreylock, her insufferable, arrogant
self-righteousness as she’d accepted Daniel’s gift while simultaneously
insisting it was valueless. The anger flared again. The Colonel had fought until
the moment of Daniel’s death to prove that his sacrifice
meant something.
The thought of Aris
selling
that kind of sacrifice for his own gain made
her sick. But Daniel was right, too; even Teal’c acknowledged it. The conflict
between the two positions made an irritating noise in her brain, like the
grinding of gears that failed to mesh. She rubbed her temple with her knuckles
as if she could get in there and fix that. Now, Sam tried not to see Daniel in
the infirmary bed, held together by bandages, dissolving into light. Gone.
Instead, she looked at him standing two feet away from her, miraculously remade,
completely new, still himself. All the same, anger glowed under the ashes.

She plucked at his sleeve to make him look at her. “Sorry,” she said
earnestly. She could see him reading her thoughts in her expression. “I’m not
blaming you. I don’t.”

“Yes you do,” he said with a brief smile that held no irony, only affection.
“It’s okay. I get it.” He gave his own original question serious consideration.
“On Kelowna, I don’t think I actually made a choice. I think circumstances made
the choice for me.”

“You would have died in any case,” Teal’c said. “But you died saving them.
That is a choice.”

After considering that argument for a few moments, Daniel finally nodded.
“Then Aris Boch isn’t as right as he thinks, is he?” He looked past Teal’c to
the far side of the hold.

“About what?” Sam asked.

“About us. Even if we do what he wants, we’re not choiceless. Not in the way
that counts.”

Sam turned to follow his gaze as he spoke and found the Colonel watching them
with dark, unreadable eyes.

One year after Jack O’Neill had rejoined the Stargate program and formed
SG-1, General George Hammond’s staff aide had given him a doomsday clock as a
gag gift, a gentle poke in the ribs because of the program’s naysayers. It stuck
up from his desk like a ticking time bomb, and Hammond had hated it, from the
screaming red of the digital display to the way the numbers flashed once a
second. Whenever he’d had teams offworld, he found himself staring at the
numbers, thinking about casualty reports and the letters he’d written to the
families of soldiers he’d sent through the ’gate. It hadn’t been long before the
clock went into the drawer and the aide was dismissed.

Even so, Hammond often thought about that clock. Especially when his people
were late reporting in.

Hours inside the mountain never seemed to match up with the hours worked in
the normal world above, especially when there were several teams offworld
operating on the local time of their destination planets. It wasn’t unusual for
teams to return in the wee hours of the morning. Hammond carried a list of all
the away missions in his head and, as if that bright red alarm were flashing in
the back of his brain, he knew when a team was even a few minutes overdue.

This time, it was SG-1.

2300 hours came and went, but he waited a few extra minutes to be sure.
“Anything?” he asked Sergeant Harriman, who was haunting the control room with
him, two ghosts augmenting the skeleton nightshirt crew.

“No, sir.” Harriman checked his watch against the ’gate system’s internal
clock. “Ten minutes overdue.”

Hammond looked through the heavy bulletproof glass at the silent grey mass of
the ’gate. “Dial it up,” he said. “There might be a problem on the other end.”

“Yes, sir,” Harriman said. A moment later, the floor shuddered as the ’gate
slowly came to life. Even after all these years, they still had those initial
tremors during the massive energy draw. The Stargate was a marvel to Hammond. He
understood its purpose, its function, but the fact of its existence still
provoked wonder in him, from time to time. He watched the wormhole blossom and
settle into a calm event horizon.

Harriman wasted no time. “SG-1, Stargate Command. Do you copy?”

They waited. Moments like these, the tension in Hammond’s gut tightened until
he felt twisted into knots. He narrowed his eyes against the glare from the
event horizon while Harriman tried again. “SG-one-niner, do you copy? Colonel
O’Neill, please respond.”

Hammond listened to a few seconds of silence, then said, “Keep trying to
raise them, Sergeant. And let me know if you do.”

“Right away, sir.” Harriman glanced up at him. “Should I call in any
additional teams?”

“SG-14 is already prepping for their departure in three hours. If need be,
we’ll scrub it and move to rescue operations.”

“Understood, sir.” Harriman went back to calling every thirty seconds on the
mark. Hammond stood behind him, mentally running down the personnel roster and
ticking off available teams. No routine mission was a priority when his people
were missing.

It was shaping up to be a long night.

Aris Boch dropped his ship out of hyperspace beyond the defense perimeter.
The planet that floated in the middle of the forward viewscreen was a thin
crescent of light, not much bigger than his thumbnail. The orbiting
ha’tak
was closer, an oblique pentagram, the central pyramid gleaming gold like a
tooth. The mothership looked no bigger than Aris’ palm, and he couldn’t help
covering it with his hand and closing his fingers into a fist around it. When
the voice of the duty officer growled out of the com demanding Aris identify
himself, Aris dropped his hand and thought of replying with a few well-placed
volleys. But modest little cargo ships like his
tel’tak
didn’t
have
weapons, did they? And if they did, the Goa’uld must never know. He
dutifully recited his pass-codes while letting his ship drift closer, riding the
momentum he’d picked up before jumping to hyperspace above Relos.