06 - Siren Song (31 page)

It must’ve shown on his face, because Sebek stood up, too, and backed away a
little. Above his head, the light in the grooves along the ceiling came to life
and followed him, the darkness retreating behind him.

Sebek closed his eyes for a moment and sighed heavily. “It’s me,” he said.
“It’s me and I don’t know how to make you believe me, Jack. I just…” His arms
rose and fell again to his sides, defeated. “Can’t you see it?” His face was
pleading.

Jack narrowed his eyes, cocked his jaw.
Do not engage,
he told
himself. Then he said, in spite of his own good advice, “What I see is a snake
with a sadistic streak this wide.” He held his arms out to illustrate.

Again with the smile. “Well, I’m not going to argue with that.” Sebek
squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head—the way Daniel did when he was
trying to bully through a problem, or when thick people weren’t listening to
reason—and when he looked up again, he seemed to have made a decision. “Okay,”
he said. Jack waited for more, but that was it.

Sebek held up his hand, palm outward, the crystal in the centre of the ribbon
device cold and black. Jack braced himself for another shot. Aris took a step
away. But instead of shooting him, Sebek lowered the weapon and started pulling
the caps off of his fingers.

Jack almost said, “Daniel?” in the way that invariably made Daniel reply, in
the same overly-patient, bemused tone, “Jack?” He ground his teeth together for
a second and then asked, in as flat a voice as he could muster, “What are you
doing?”

“I’m giving you the ribbon device.”

“Well, that’s… stupid.”

The snake angled his head in a half-shrug of acknowledgment and looked at
Jack from under his raised eyebrows, like he would if he were Daniel and was
glancing up at him over the rims of his glasses. That smile again. “That’s the
point.”

Jack’s own eyebrows shot up. “Stupid is the point?”

Sebek huffed out a laugh as he wriggled out of the coil brace wound around
his forearm. “No,” he answered patiently, like Jack was one of the slower, if
good-natured, kids in the class. “The part where I trust you is the point.” He
tossed the device to Jack, who caught it against his chest. “Even if you don’t
trust me.”

The device was warm, and Jack suppressed a shudder as he hooked two fingers
through the coil and let it hang at his side away from his body. He had to give
the snake credit. This was a whole new level of sinister. A wave of nausea
churned through him and the ice pick twisted and twisted in his eye. The man in
front of him—Sebek—was watching him, nothing in his expression except a trace of hope, there, in the slight dimple at the corner of his mouth where
that resigned smile was trying to get out again.

After a few silent seconds, the man raised his now naked fingers and pinched
the bridge of his nose, swaying a little. “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said, rubbing
his eyes with a finger and thumb before dropping his arm like it was too heavy
to carry anymore, his whole frame slumping. “This situation… I know this
sucks. But you have to decide what you’re going to do. I have some control here.
I really do. But Sebek is close, and he’s not happy. If he gets control again
he’s going to punish both of us for this, so I’d like this time to count for
something.” He spread his arms, open, exposed. “Trust me, or kill me.” When Jack
didn’t move, he aimed his gaze at Aris. “Okay, you do it then. It’s why you’re
here, isn’t it?”

Aris shifted his weight, but his face betrayed nothing. “I’m here to serve my
god,” he said. Jack had to give him points for managing that without rolling his
eyes.

Sebek gave him a painfully Danielesque “oh, please” expression. “Sebek knows,
Aris. He knows about your little arms-smuggling venture. He knows about your
sister and her blasphemous cult, as he thinks of it.”

Aris’ jaw muscle twitched, but that was it.

Clearly frustrated, the snake went on, faster now, steamrollering the
opposition, his eyes blazing, lips thinned, teeth showing—Daniel on a tear.
“The only reason he’s brought you in here is because the Jaffa get sick and he
needs you to ride roughshod over Jack. He knows you’ll do as you’re told because
he knows you love your son. But as soon as he finds what he’s looking for, he’s
going to kill both of you, and then he’ll find your sister and all her followers
and he’ll wipe them out, and he’ll do it as brutally and publicly as possible as
an example to the others, and all that is going to happen unless you either
listen to what I have to say or you shoot me. Put me out of my misery before
Sebek comes back. Do us all a favor.”

Aris snapped the blaster up, stiff-armed. The power-pack whined as he keyed
the safety off.

Jack stepped in front of it.

The ice pick was grinding against his skull like a drill, and in his grip,
the ribbon device was heavy and warm and coiled like a snake, and in the pool of
light around the three men, seconds stretched out and out until he could feel
every heartbeat building, striking, ebbing. Aris didn’t pull the trigger. Behind
Jack, that thing, whoever it was, stood still and quiet and was radiating
despair and anger and impatience.

Jack laid his hand with its crooked, broken finger on the top of the muzzle
and pressed down against Aris’ resistance. “Whoa,” he said in his
talking-to-mad-dogs voice. “Let’s take a minute here.” Half of his brain was
shouting at him to step out of the way and get it over with. The other half was
thinking about that smile, the resignation, Daniel’s voice saying,
Can’t you
see it?

It was true: there were times when the snake’s control wasn’t absolute. Jack
had seen it himself, on Tollana, when Klorel and Skaara were in court fighting
for ownership of Skaara’s body. And before that, when he’d
zatted
Klorel
on Apophis’ ship, and Skaara had surfaced to apologize—
apologize
—for
not being strong enough. He could even feel a skirling memory of his own,
somewhere way back behind the noise and the forgetting, Kanan compelled to
return for Ba’al’s lo’tar, to walk into a fortress because
Jack
would
never leave someone behind. But no, he didn’t really remember that. He’d been
told that, after. But still, it kind of made sense.

Jack would never leave someone behind.

And Daniel was in there, somewhere, and that despair Jack could feel against
his back like a hot breath, that was Daniel, maybe.

Or maybe not.

But if Daniel could get control, even for a moment, there was hope.

Crap.

Aris’ gun hovered over the middle of Jack’s chest, humming with violence.
Instead of forcing it, Jack dropped his hand and stared at Aris until he met
Jack’s eyes.

“It’s my friend in there. My call,” Jack said in a low, steady voice.

“You believe this?” Aris waggled the gun a little to point at Sebek through Jack’s chest.

Jack said nothing for a long moment. Aris’ gun moved minutely an inch from
Jack’s chest, jittering with Aris’ heartbeat. “You need him. If you didn’t you
wouldn’t have pulled me off him
twice
.”

Axis paused for a long moment and then laughed, one sharp, incredulous bark.
Then he keyed the safety and lowered his gun. “Okay, Colonel. But this is not a
promise. Your friend—
if
that’s him—gets us where I want to go, he
buys himself some time.” He pressed a key and the blaster powered down. “You
didn’t strike me as the type to be taken in by Goa’uld tricks.”

The feeling of tension sizzling away was so palpable that Jack could almost
see it go, electricity arcing and fading. He let out the breath he didn’t know
he’d been holding.

Behind him someone—Daniel, Sebek—let out a breath, too.

“Nothing’s changed,” Aris said to Jack, his gaze straying over Jack’s
shoulder. “You knew he was in there before.”

“I know.”

“He’s playing you for sympathy. He doesn’t want to die.”

“I know.”

“One thing
has
changed,” Sebek, or Daniel, answered. Jack had to
figure out what to call the guy. He considered something neutral, like Lenny.
But the guy didn’t sound like a Lenny. He sounded like Daniel. Sebek-Daniel went
on. “It’s harder to kill me now. It was easier to imagine it before when he
couldn’t hear me.”

Jack didn’t rum around. He hated snakes. He hated this one most of all, and
that was saying something, the whole Kanan thing considered.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I’m sorry you’re in this position. I’m sorry I couldn’t
stop it from happening.” There was a pause. Jack could imagine Daniel’s eyes
darting back and forth as he gathered up the words, and the way he used the time
to rein in the panic, pulling back into that deceptively, maddeningly calm
voice. But, no, that was Daniel. This was…

Jack closed his eyes.

Daniel, or Sebek, kept right on talking. “I was disoriented and I fell. When
I opened my eyes I could see him—it—Sebek—coming, crawling out of the old host, out of his
head and
I couldn’t—”

Jack turned then, in time to see Sebek-Daniel rub the back of his hand across
his mouth like he was trying to wipe away the taste of something nasty.

“At least I won’t have a scar,” Sebek-Daniel said, with that ironic smile
again.

“Small mercies,” Jack replied before he could smother the sympathy behind it,
so he dropped the ribbon device on the floor and ground the crystal under his
heel instead. “All right, Daniel.” He made sure the skeptical quotation marks
there were audible in his voice. “Then let’s get out of here.” A new wave of
nausea almost knocked him off his feet again, but he squinted his eyes against
it and hooked a thumb over his shoulder the way they’d come. “Daylight’s that
way.”

Daniel didn’t move, but he frowned that schoolmarm frown at him again. “Uh,
no.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We have to go that way.” Daniel pointed behind himself where the wall curved
into darkness.

“Why?”

Daniel didn’t say, “duh”, but the look on his face was the next best thing.
If this guy wasn’t the genuine article, he was at least as annoying. “It’s what
we came for.”

“No,” Jack corrected in a tone whose patience conveyed how not patient he
was. “
Sebek
came for it—and you don’t even know what ‘it’ is. We’re
just along to do the heavy lifting.” He included Aris in the circle of
indentured help.

“I think—”

Jack sliced the air with the blade of his hand. “Did you or did you not just
say that Sebek was going to come back, and he was going to kill everybody in a
spectacular and bloody way?”

“That’s what
he’d
do, yes, but—”

“Then the prudent thing to do is to get Sebek out of here before he does
that, don’t you think? And since he’s currently piggy-backing
on your brain,
you should come with.” Shifting his weight, he started to loop his hands
over his P90, remembered belatedly that it wasn’t there, and had to settle for folding his arms. “
If
it’s
really you, that is.”

“Jack—”

“You want me to trust you? Come back to the SGC and give yourself up. Then
I’ll trust you. Maybe.” And that was a hell of an ultimatum. Jack tried not to
think about what life would be like for Daniel on Earth—maybe locked up in
some basement level of Area 51—if they couldn’t find a helpful Tok’ra to
winnow Sebek out of there. But he could only deal with one gut-wrenching ethical
dilemma at a time.

Daniel looked past Jack toward the entrance and then back the other way, his
face screwed up like he was in physical pain. And maybe he was. Just thinking
about winding their way back through all those dark corridors was enough to make
Jack feel like there was a sack of bricks on his back. But he thought of his
kitchen and his refrigerator and that last beer all frosty inside it and about
how all of that was waiting for him way, way, way,
way
the hell back
there, and it was enough to make it seem worth it. The fact that he wasn’t
actually running toward that beer was a problem. He wanted to go. He was
standing there, not going. And not because Daniel was dragging his feet, either.
That image of his own face reflecting in mirrored eyes flickered across his
mind, and he squeezed his forehead with his fingers and thumb.

“It’ll still be here after we get the snake out of your head.”

“You know better than anyone there’s no guarantee of that,” Daniel said,
looking at him steadily. “Sebek might kill me first, to spite you. It’s this
place, Jack. Something here is helping me get control. I wouldn’t have it for
long once we left here. You can’t allow that to happen.”

For a long, sickening moment, Jack heard the echo of what Daniel hadn’t said,
what he’d implied. It was what he’d been thinking all along, and Daniel knew it.

“There’s more to it than that,” Daniel said, and reached out his hand. This
time, he touched the wall himself, his fingertips tracing one of the glyphs as
Jack had seen him do a thousand times, waiting for some old language to tell him
how to read it. The symbols beneath his fingertips shone softly. His head snapped back and he gasped, and
he jerked away from the wall and staggered sideways. When he opened his eyes, he
blinked at Jack as though he couldn’t really see him, until finally, his gaze
focused. “It isn’t just you,” Daniel said. “That’s what Sebek really wanted to
know. Who can have access to this place.”

“So you’re telling me anyone can do that?” Jack said, as the alarming
possibilities unfolded for him.

“Yes.” Daniel took a few deep breaths. “We’ve won the race to get to it. Even
if Yu is on his way, we’re here now.” He looked down the dark curve of the
passageway.

Jack was opening his mouth to say something—he wasn’t sure what—when Aris
neatly put an end to the argument by nestling the muzzle of his blaster into the
notch at the base of Jack’s skull. The hum of the power pack made all the little
hairs on the back of Jack’s neck stand up.