06 - Siren Song (34 page)

O’Neill turned his head toward Jackson. Aris couldn’t see his face, but
whatever Jackson saw there was worthy of a brief half-smile. “Well, that sounds
fun,” O’Neill said. “Remember anything useful?”

“Not really. Just a feeling of being weightless. Or… no. Bodiless. Not
solid. And drifting, expanding.”

“Weird,” was all the analysis O’Neill offered, and Jackson nodded. They fell
quiet.

In the lull, for the first time since he’d descended down into this hellhole,
Aris permitted himself to think of Aadi, unfolding the memories of his son like
a piece of fragile paper. His son was no longer a child; he was old enough to
control his own destiny. It would be good to give him that chance. He could see
traces of his own nature in Aadi—his cunning, most of all. It seemed Aadi had
grown ten years in a single night, but there had been many nights, first in
Sokar’s mines, and then in the service of Apophis, and finally in chains forged
by Sebek’s Jaffa. When Aris had last seen him, huddled in his cell, he had grown
muscles where only skin and bones had been before, and his eyes had held a dull
acceptance of how things had to be. That look pained Aris more than any wound or
oppression ever could. Away from here, maybe, growing up wasn’t the same as
giving in. His son’s face loomed in the shadows of his memory, and he couldn’t
tuck it neatly away.

The tips of his fingers shook as a sound trickled through the darkness. He
raised his head and listened. It was a child, sobbing. Impossible. He clasped
his fingers together to stop the palsied shaking, then glanced at O’Neill and
Jackson. They were both silent, their eyes closed, asleep on their feet. Aris
groped for the
roshna
secreted in the pockets of his armor, but moved his
hand away. The soft sound bubbled up again, one loud wail, subsiding to quiet
crying. His son had cried that way when the Goa’uld had taken him from his
mother’s arms. Aris could see him now, kicking his short legs, his mouth open in
a scream of agony that had given way into snuffling sobs. He gritted his teeth
and tried to block the memory, but, although it seemed to ebb, it came back
stronger, like it had paused to gained strength: Aadi, thrashing with hunger as Aris cleaned his
armor and prepared to sell his soul to feed his son. A low shiver crept up his
spine.

Jackson and O’Neill were speaking again. With difficulty, Aris focused on the
conversation.

“Daniel,” O’Neill said. “There’s something else. That woman. I’ve been seeing
her longer than you have.”

“Is she—” Jackson began, but then his expression distorted, twisted, and he
gasped, flailing for the wall. O’Neill straightened and backed up a step, but
made no move to help him. Smart man; Aris had always known O’Neill’s instincts
for self-preservation would come in handy here. They watched in silence as
Jackson battled for control of his own body, the struggle playing out in a
grotesque pantomime of jerking limbs and facial expressions. Aris’ fingers
tightened on his weapon. If this was the time, he’d have to do it without
telegraphing his intention to O’Neill, or there’d be a repeat of the touching
intervention they’d had earlier.

Jackson slammed back against the one of the blank pillars, groping for a
handhold, as palpable frustration radiated from O’Neill. Jackson made a
strangled sound, and rasped, “Jack, quickly. Tell me.”

“Well, what if she’s really just a hallucination?”

“Brought on by this place,” Jackson said softly. “It’s a trick, to draw us in
deeper.” He slid down the wall, one hand clasping at the other as if they were
not connected, and Aris remembered Sebek seating the hand device between his
fingers in that way. Jackson closed his eyes.

“He’s losing control,” Aris said to O’Neill, who nodded once at the obvious
but said nothing. All his attention was focused on Jackson. Aris looked at
O’Neill for a long, long moment, as a decision formed in the back of his mind.
There was no trust between them, but they might be able to help each other.

After a moment, he drew his knife and held it out to O’Neill, offered in his
open palm. A muscle in O’Neill’s jaw twitched as he looked at it first and then
into Aris’ face. His expression was stony, but his eyes were wild. “I won’t
need it,” he said, and made no move to take it. Aris didn’t need an interpreter. He’d seen what career
soldiers could do with their bare hands.

With one swift motion, he sheathed the knife. “When you do,” he said
casually, the offer implied.

Jackson’s eyes flew open and shifted over to them. His body relaxed and he
slumped, exhausted, as if he’d been fighting for hours. Aris supposed he had, in
a way. “Still here,” Jackson said. “For now.”

“Good,” Aris said. “Enough stories about your touching memories. What does it
all mean?”

“I have no idea,” Jackson said. He wiped sweat from his face with the bottom
of his t-shirt. “There’s almost no barrier between us anymore.”

“What? Between… ?” O’Neill frowned, his finger waving between himself and
Jackson and Aris, and then pointing down the hallway at the distant glimmer of
fading light. “The woman?”

“Sebek and me. I have better access to his memories, now, when he’s trying to
get control. Before, I was working at getting at them, but now I can’t stop
seeing them.” Jackson shook his head, then thumped it sharply against the wall.
When he looked up at O’Neill, he smiled an odd, humorless smile and said, “I
really don’t want to see them.”

“Join the club,” O’Neill said.

“Right,” Jackson answered. He pulled his knees up and propped his arms on
them. “Sometimes I feel like saying something, and I’m not sure if I’m really
the one who’s talking. I don’t know if it’s really me.”

Aris winced and spared a moment of gratitude that he’d never know what it was
like. Much better to be dead.

“I can’t wait to blow up whatever is in the middle of this thing,” O’Neill
said softly, but with such underlying savagery that Jackson tilted his head to
look at him.

“Jack?”

O’Neill squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head violently. Aris’ first
instinct was to pull him away from the wall, but he realized at that moment that
O’Neill wasn’t touching anything. “Could someone please explain to me why I’ve got someone else’s memories running
around in my head?” O’Neill sounded perfectly rational, but something in his
posture… Jackson lurched to his feet.

“Jack, what are you seeing?”

“Dead children,” O’Neill said, his jaw set so hard Aris thought it might
crack. “Dead planets. Big ugly motherships, Jaffa everywhere. Mines. Some big
tower in the middle of a city, and… this mountain, but without the mine.” He
squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could stop seeing that way. “This planet, I
think. Not like it is now, though.”

Jackson hissed in a breath. “Uh-oh.”

“I’m losing patience,” Aris said. In fact, his patience had been lost hours
ago, and now his skin was crawling as he watched O’Neill’s body go rigid with
the effort of driving away whatever was invading his head.

“Those might be Sebek’s memories,” Jackson said, staring at O’Neill. “Goa’uld
genetic memories, maybe; I can’t tell. But he showed that to me.”

O’Neill swayed. Aris gripped his arm and shoved him roughly against the
support of the wall.

“Nice,” O’Neill said bitterly. “Like I didn’t have enough crap of my own in
here.” He cast a narrow-eyed glance at Aris, but looked away when he said,
“Crying. There’s a baby, crying.” Again, he screwed shut his eyes and covered
his ear with one hand. “Damnit,” he muttered tonelessly.

Jackson turned Aris, waiting for confirmation, but Aris kept his face bland,
even though all of his skin was prickling.

Jackson nodded, letting it go, and stepped closer to O’Neill, protectively.
There was irony there, but Aris wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it properly. An
insistent ache had been building at the base of his skull for hours; the
roshna
was eating him alive. No way to know how long it would take to reach
the center, if there even was a center, and no way to get out. And now this
pleasant development.

Things weren’t looking up.

“We need to get moving,” Aris said, and shook O’Neill by the arm. “Now.”

“What’s your hurry?” O’Neill pushed Aris’ hand off.

“No, Jack, he’s right.” Jackson began wandering away from them, back down the
corridor, but O’Neill caught him by the shoulder and stopped him. Aris glanced
down into the darkness and saw nothing, but… the feeling of their guide was
with him, as if he could hear her speaking and see her hand beckoning to them.
This way. Hurry.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be so hot to follow her,” O’Neill said, staring in the
same direction, but clearly he could see what Aris was missing. If he looked
askance, though, she flickered at the edges of his vision.

“You have a better option for us?” Aris asked.

“You’ve got me there,” O’Neill said. He released Jackson’s shoulder, and
Jackson began moving immediately, as if someone had tugged him on a string. Then
he stopped abruptly. O’Neill stepped warily toward him. “Daniel?”

The hair on the back of Aris’ neck rose as though someone was behind him. He
turned, but it was the same darkness as before, nothing of substance hiding
there.

Beside him, O’Neill muttered, “What the hell?” and jumped away from him,
swinging at thin air. Aris sidestepped and pressed against the opposite wall,
his weapon raised.

“Okay, now she’s just screwing with us,” O’Neill said angrily.

Aris could hear her now, not a voice in his head, but in the echoing maze.
You must hurry!
He glanced over at O’Neill, who nodded at him, and then at
Jackson, who was standing perfectly still, staring down the corridor. “Jackson?
You hear that?”

“We have heard the voice of our ascendancy,” Sebek said, in his strange
distorted growl, “and we will use this place to claim our rightful power, and to
unseat our Lord Yu from this world, and all the others his hand has touched.”

O’Neill winced. Jackson fell forward on his knees. Neither O’Neill nor Aris
made a move to pick him up. Too risky to get too close, if Sebek was driving.

“Damn,” Jackson said, in the weariest tone Aris had ever heard.

“It’s… hard to push him back.”

“You sure that was Sebek?” O’Neill asked, and now he did move to help Jackson
up. “I’ve always thought you had a jones to take over the universe.”

“That’s beside the point,” Jackson said, offering a weak smile, which O’Neill
returned.

“Let’s move,” Aris said again. “Get this over with.” He stepped up beside
Jackson, and the three of them resumed their trek into the dark.

After her feet skidded out from under her for the fourth time on the slick
stone of the tunnel floor, Sam didn’t bother cursing under her breath. She
cursed over her breath, or whatever the opposite was. The not-very-ladylike word
got caught under the low ceiling and the echoes bounced back and forth like
there was someone further down the tunnel in the dark who had also skinned the
heels of her hands again and whose backside was also soaked. Sam was happy for
the commiseration, even though the echoes reminded her that they were trying to
be stealthy, and that bitching out loud wasn’t exactly textbook.

Still, it felt good. So she did it again. When she got home, she was going to
lock herself in the bathroom and curse for five minutes straight. It wasn’t much
as far as rewards went, but at the moment it seemed pretty damn appealing.

She let Teal’c pull her to her feet, wiped her hands on her thighs, and found
Hamel in the gloomy light of the flash stick.

“How much farther?”

If they had to grope their way across the entire city, they’d be at it a long
time. Condensation dripped from the ceiling and down the back of her jacket. In
the distance, the sound of rushing water pulled at her concentration.

Hamel pushed between Behn and Frey to take the light stick from her. “Not
far. Just a little way now.”

She waited until the little band of soldiers got moving again and followed
the sound of their bare feet slapping on the wet stone. Teal’c fell into step
beside her and put out a steadying hand as one foot skidded out from under her
again. Her rueful laugh tumbled around in the echoes.

Hamel was true to his word, though. It wasn’t much farther. In fact, the next
time she lost her footing, she slid into Eche and the two of them ended up knee
deep in the river. Or, at least, it was knee deep once they struggled to their
feet again, and Sam caught Eche when the current knocked him over before he got fully upright. His momentum
almost took them both down again. By this time, Sam’s head was ringing with all
the cursing she was going to do when she got home.

The frigid water smelled lifeless and oily. She indulged in a brief fantasy
about her bathrobe.

“Please tell me we aren’t wading the rest of the way,” she said to Hamel, who
coughed out a chuckle and waved Behn and Rebnet off into the shadows.

They took the light stick with them, and the rest of them stood shivering on
the river bank. Sam kept a hand twisted in the arm of Teal’c’s jacket and
someone, she didn’t know who but suspected Eche, had his hand twisted in the
waistband of hers. After she’d started to wonder if Behn and Rebnet had
abandoned them down here in the dark, she heard them coming back their way,
accompanied by the hollow thudding of water against something large and empty.

It turned out to be a flat-bottomed boat with low sides and tall spars at bow
and stem, each one with a clasp hanging loose and swinging against the wood.

“In,” Hamel ordered and held the boat steady while everyone but him and Frey
clambered in and sat down between the moldy ribs.

Their feet slipping every second step or so, he and Frey leaned hard against
the current until they managed to get the boat moving slowly upstream. Finally
they came to the edge of the landing where the sloping tunnel met the river, and
the wall of stone cut off further progress along the bank. Here, Frey scrambled
into the boat and helped Hamel attach the clasps to a double rope looped through
a pulley waist-high on yet another tunnel wall. Once the boat was attached,
Hamel jumped in, and the two men began to draw the boat along against the
current by pulling the rope handover-hand. The boat moved slowly but steadily
upstream, through a tunnel barely wide enough to accommodate it. The tallest of
them all, Teal’c had to hunch low to keep from banging his head on the ceiling.
After a few moments of listening to Hamel and Frey breathing and grunting, Sam
and Teal’c crawled over and knelt next to the rope—the others moving port to balance the boat—and leaned their own
weight into the effort. If it hadn’t been for the slight variation in shadows on
the stone that skimmed along beside her head, Sam would have doubted that they
were moving at all.