06 - Siren Song (32 page)

“Yu has no right to this,” Aris said. “Neither does Sebek.”

So much for his feigned deference to the god. It seemed that Aris, at least,
was either pretty sure he was talking to the real Daniel, or that he didn’t care
one way or the other. In Jack’s educated opinion, this was a bad sign.

Aris wiggled the blaster a little and some compartmentalized portion of
Jack’s brain wondered if it was a coincidence that the muzzle was so perfectly
shaped to fit in just that spot. He slowly unfolded his arms and let them hang,
hands open. He did the math, though, and still came up on the short end. He met
Daniel’s eyes and could see him assessing the situation with that studied,
neutral curiosity he brought out when confronted with deadly things. But behind
that there was the faintest gleam of panic. Both of them together could take
Aris, especially if Daniel had any of that souped-up snake-power that made
Goa’uld so arrogant and hard to kill.

But Daniel didn’t move. Instead, he turned and looked into the shadows again
for a long moment before turning back, not to Jack, but to Aris.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

Aris shifted his weight a little behind Jack. “Whatever is in here is meant for us.
My people,
not yours. You’re going to help me get
it.”

Slowly, Daniel raised a hand, a palm-out, soothing gesture. “Okay,” he said
carefully. “Okay. We both want to understand this place. But you don’t need
Jack. You can let him go. He can find Sam and Teal’c and get out of here before
Yu comes. And you and I can keep going. I’ll help you.”

“Not an option,” Jack said. “Putting aside for the moment the fact that we
can’t get out, you are not staying here to get picked up by a System Lord.” He
stabbed a finger at Daniel’s forehead where all the classified information was
kept.

The whine vibrating through Jack’s bones wound up a notch as Aris keyed the
safety off. “Nobody’s going anywhere.”

Now Daniel’s patient, placating expression creased into a frown of
irritation. “You need me. You don’t need him.”

“Sure I do,” Aris answered, and to demonstrate, he laid his free hand flat
against the glyphs on the wall. Nothing happened. No glowing. No fancy colors.

“It doesn’t work for you,” Daniel said, unnecessarily.

“Apparently not.”

“Why?”

Jack felt the gun shift as Aris shrugged. “Same reason we’re resistant to
Goa’uld technology, I suppose. We were altered by the beings who sent us here.”

“The Ancients.”

Another shrug. “Your word. My sister calls them the Nitori.”

Daniel blinked, accessing his inner database. “Those who glow.” A smile
warmed his face for a second.

Jack piped up. “Yeah, well, if the Ancients locked the place up and broke you
so you can’t get the surround-sound-smell-o-vision, then maybe this place
isn’t
for you, then, hmmm?” He took a step away from the gun. Aris didn’t
follow.

When Jack turned around, Aris trained the blaster on his chest.

“Well, I’m no believer in fate or miracles,” Aris said, “but someone
made
you,
and you are conveniently trapped in here to turn stuff on for me.
Which of us feels awful down here, and which of us feels fit and happy and capable of shooting holes in people, hmmm?”

“He’s right,” Daniel said in that vague tone that meant most of his brain was
elsewhere. “The Ancients must have found a way to make his people impervious to
the negative effects of this place, whatever it is that’s making Sebek crazy.
And they made them impervious to blending, so that the Goa’uld couldn’t use them
to get in here.” Daniel cast him a sidelong glance that made Jack’s heart sink.
He braced himself. “And, truth is, you’re the only one who can touch the walls
safely, more or less. And that means you’re key to figuring this place out.”

Jack opened his mouth to protest—Daniel could get the lights jumping as
well as he could—but Daniel cut him off.

“I can’t do it. I can barely keep a grip as it is. I touch the wall enough to
get any real information, and Sebek comes back.” He wrinkled his brow in the
sympathy-for-the-screwed kind of way. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

Jack wished that Daniel would quit apologizing and start helping him get the
damn blaster away from Aris. But as soon as he started to formulate a plan in
that direction, the vertigo hit him again like a riptide pulling the sand out
from under his boots and that image of the mirrored eyes and scales like flakes
of glass stuttered and flashed in his head. He started to slump, but was caught
under the arm and levered carefully to the floor.

When he lifted his head from between his raised knees, Daniel was crouching
beside him, peering at him nearsightedly.

“Why didn’t Sebek fix your eyes?” Jack asked.

Daniel grinned a little at the
non sequitur.
“He’s too busy trying to
keep my head from exploding.” He looked over his shoulder at Aris before going
on. “Look, Aris isn’t going to let you go. And you’re too messed up to fight
him.”

“I could if I had some help,” Jack answered testily.

With a wince, Daniel looked down at his hands. “I think I have an idea about
this place.” He met Jack’s eyes. “When you touched the wall, what did you see?”
Jack rolled his eyes and said nothing. “Jack,” Daniel prodded, literally, two
fingers jabbing him in the arm.

“I saw a sea monster and his girlfriend.” To Aris’ snort of laughter, he
added, “You
asked
.”

“You saw it, or you felt it?”

Jack shrugged, not wanting to dwell on it, the sinuous bending of his spine,
the heavy power of his jaws cracking open impossibly wide and the sea rushing
in. “Felt it.”

“What else?”

“A planet. A space station or a ship.” He decided to leave off the part about
the big-ass weapons platform.

“Huh,” Daniel said and his eyes went distant. Jack was afraid that when
Daniel focused on him again, it would be Sebek looking out. He was more afraid,
though, that he wouldn’t be able to tell. Sometimes hope was deadly.

“What?” Aris demanded when the silence stretched out and Daniel kept
rummaging around inside the maze in his own head.

When he came back to them, he seemed to be Daniel, still. Pushing himself to
his feet, he nodded, confirming something to himself. “It’s not a weapon,” he
said. “At least I don’t think so.”

“Then what?” Aris didn’t sound at all happy about this analysis.

Daniel walked over to the wall and ran his hand quickly over the glyphs, an
inch above the surface, watching the colored light course its way from panel to
panel. He pulled away quickly. “It’s a library.”

“A library,” Jack repeated flatly. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“No, I’m not.” When Daniel turned back to him, his face was alight with the
excitement of discovery. He pointed at the wall. “These panels. They must be
recordings. Experiences.” He spread his arms wide to take in the maze as a
whole. “Millions of them. Some kind of somatic archive. Sense memories.” His
hands fell as he gazed with a kind of fevered reverence over Jack’s head and at
the wall on the other side of the passage. “It’s… amazing.”

Jack squinted skeptically up at him. “Why would the Ancients lock up a
library
?”

Daniel looked incredulous. “Are you kidding?”

“No. You’ll know when I’m kidding.”

“It’s knowledge, Jack. Knowledge—”

“—is power. Yeah, I get it. But please tell me there’s more to this than
sea-monster porn.”

Daniel blinked. “Well, maybe it’s not all that kind of everyday stuff. Maybe
there’s other things here. You said you saw a ship.” He licked his lips, letting
his eyes roam the walls. “I mean, think about how far we’ve come into this
place, and every single surface is covered with these glyphs. Who knows what
there might be in here?” He turned to Aris. “Maybe even something to help your
people. Maybe something that can help us all.”

“Maybe that’s not good enough,” Aris growled, taking a step toward him. “Yu
is on his way here
now.
We don’t have time to touch each panel until we
find something useful.”

Jack said a silent alleluia.

Daniel looked nonplussed for a second. Jack was getting a crick in his neck.

“Well, there must be a system here,” Daniel said with a wave toward the
walls. “Categorization of some kind.” He pointed to panels in turn as he spoke.
“Desert. Sea monster. Ship. Libraries always have a system. This is a maze, not
a labyrinth. Order, not randomness. We just have to figure out the system and
then—”

“Or we can ask the librarian.”

Jack followed the line of Aris’ aim toward the curve of the hallway, and
damned if his hallucination wasn’t standing there watching them. For a second
she seemed to be partially invisible, but he realized that it was a trick of her
shining scales that reflected the walls around her in shifting ripples. The
scales on her upper body were more iridescent than simply reflective, though,
and her breasts, shoulders and arms were faintly blue and covered with rainbows
like oil on the surface of the water. Her bald head was angled curiously, and
the mirrored eyes, even without irises or pupils, didn’t seem at all blind as
she shifted her attention from Aris to Jack to Daniel. When she smiled, fine,
pointed teeth showed between her full, white lips.

A quick glance at Daniel confirmed that Jack wasn’t the only one seeing her,
but just in case, Jack said, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“You mean a woman with mirrors for eyes and glass scales like a mermaid?”
Daniel asked, still turned toward the apparition in the passageway.

“Yeah.”

“Nope.”

“Very funny, Daniel.” Jack rubbed his eye with his fist and used Daniel’s
pant leg to drag himself to his feet. “This must be what going crazy feels
like.”

Daniel nodded absently, saying, “Yeah, something like this,” as he started
off down the hall toward her.

Jack hooked him by the collar of his shirt. “Where do you think you’re
going?”

“To follow the glass lady?” Daniel pried Jack’s fingers away. “Who is
leaving, by the way.”

And she was. Jack could see the shimmer of her skin as she turned and
followed the curve of the wall into the shadows. The light fluttered inside the
walls, coursing after her, chasing darkness. Jack couldn’t be sure, but there
was a faint sharpening inside his head, like his alertness was being honed from
dullness, and something that seemed like singing, a high, clear, wordless song.
The sound was like a ribbon woven between his ribs, tugging at him.

Aris gave Jack a shove. “You heard the man. Follow the nice glass lady.”

Sam trailed her fingers along the smooth surface of the alley wall and
wondered what Daniel would make of it. Some kind of glazed clay, she thought,
but how had they made it in such long, unbroken segments? Under her boots, the
ubiquitous mosaic stuttered around potholes and disappeared like interrupted
sentences under new walls and the fallen pieces of old ones. There was probably
a story there in the pictures, and another, sadder one in the way it had been
broken and remade by the makeshift city. Daniel would know how to read both.
She’d seen him reconstruct a whole village from the faint lines of buried
foundations and the distribution of charred animal bones and broken pots, and
his hands had moved through the air as he described the way families had
gathered around this tumble of flat stones that was a hearth, had carried water
from that spring, had knelt here to scrape the fur from some fantastic animal
with a bone tool familiar on two dozen planets and across millennia. With its
past and present layered together like graffiti on a Da Vinci, this city would
be a treasure for him, echoing with voices.

To her, the city was silent, full of crouching shadows and blank spaces that
she couldn’t help but mentally fill with waiting Jaffa. But Hamel moved swiftly
and confidently from alley to alley, pausing occasionally to peer around a
corner before darting out and waving at them to follow. His lantern bounced and
swayed, and the city leaped into existence and faded to inference as they
passed. It didn’t take long, though, for Sam understand where they were headed,
once she’d figured out that they were coming at it from a different angle,
Hamel’s own shortcut. The Ancient tower was like a compass with the whole city
laid out around it in her mind.

Even with the darkness and the cold rain, though, this trip seemed to take
less time than the first one, and they were crowding into the low-roofed
alleyway and crossing the familiar little courtyard in only a few minutes.
Adrenaline was going to be messing with her time sense from here on in, stretching and contracting duration. Sam
started checking her watch, the first stage in detaching events from her
subjective responses. Falling into the familiar routine, she already felt her
mind coming into tighter, clearer focus.

At the hidden door, she pushed past Behn and Teal’c and leaned down with
Hamel to inspect the lock.

“I don’t suppose you have the key,” Sam said, remembering that Brenneka kept
it in her pocket.

Hamel looked uncomfortable but resigned. “No. We’ll have to break it.”

Behind them rose a murmur, and she glanced back to see the little team
finishing their reverential gesture, their faces clouded with concern. No one
looked likely to volunteer to do the desecrating, so she nodded and waved Hamel
out of the way.

Sam handed the
zat
to Teal’c and was winding up to deliver a kick to
the latch when Hamel’s hand on her arm stopped her. Teal’c was already aiming
the
zat
out of the circle of light at a bulky shadow in the middle of
alley.

“It’s me.” The gruff rumble of a voice seemed more irritated than scared.

“Esa,” Hamel breathed next to Sam’s ear, and she could feel some of his
tension release as he stepped around her. “What are you doing here?” he
whispered.