06 - Siren Song (6 page)

Daniel made his face settle into a determined but reasonable cast. “I’m
telling you what I see, that’s all.”

“You have to see more than the obvious. Maybe the concept of the death of
thousands is too abstract for you. Maybe I need to put this in concrete terms.”
Aris pressed harder on Jack’s finger. “For instance, this finger is the morning
shift in the mine.” Jack’s expression didn’t change, but he hunched forward a
little more.

Holding out a placating hand, Daniel licked his lips. From the corner of his
eye, he saw Sam and Teal’c were poised in a way that suggested they were already plotting their moves. “I get it,” Daniel told
Aris levelly. “I get the concept, believe me. I don’t need any demonstrations.”
The concept was all too clear, embodied by an empty planet that had once been
his home, and a people who no longer existed.

“Daniel,” Jack warned through gritted teeth.

“Jack.” He waved behind him at the door. “The
Ancients,
Jack.”

“The
Goa’uld,
Daniel.” Jack clamped his teeth shut when Aris twisted
a little harder.

“Start reading,” Aris ordered.

“Don’t,” Jack said.

“Start reading,” Aris repeated.

“Jack-—”

Aris twisted again, and even from where he stood Daniel could hear the pop of
Jack’s finger breaking. Opening his mouth wide, Jack let out a gasp that didn’t
become a shout. Then he locked his jaws again.

Under Daniel’s feet, the floor lurched. He was aware of Sam yelling
something, of Teal’c pulling her back with a hand on her arm, but it suddenly
seemed like they were on television, separate, flattened, unreal. His ears
started ringing. He leaned his back heavily against the door and, spreading a
hand out beside his waist, let his fingers fall into the lines and angles of the
strange script. He could feel the meaning in them vibrating through his
fingertips. A memory stirred—a silver-backed fish darting under black water—and faded. He let go of the wall and rubbed his temple with his knuckles. He’d
seen this script before. Behind his eyes, he could feel the pressure of wind
blowing up from an ocean, the smell of salt, warm grass. The Ancient words
seemed to bruise his backbone and the pain anchored him. His fingers found their
way back to the alien script. Still on his knees in Aris’ grip, Jack glared
into the space in front of him, breathing hard.

“Easter,” Daniel whispered. He rolled onto his shoulder and pushed himself
away from the door with one hand. He let his head fall back, and his eyes
trailed the script from right to left, from left to right, drifting downward
until they fell on the familiar shapes of the Ancient letters. They were layered on top of the original incised
writing, as incongruous as graffiti on the Parthenon.

Behind him, Jack grunted and there was a muffled thud as he fell forward onto
the stone floor. Outside the crushers on the plateau pounded their unrelenting
rhythm and sent their vibrations deep into the mountain, through bedrock, into
Daniel’s bones, a shuddering like music you can’t dance to. The Ancient letters
seemed to float in front of the cryptic text, fuzzed around the edges as they
jittered a little in front of Daniel’s eyes, keeping time with the pounding in
the mountain or maybe the pounding of his heart—he couldn’t tell. He heard a
gust of breath as Jack sat up and cradled his hand against his chest. Aris’
boots scraped the floor. The sounds were too bright, and in Daniel’s mind’s eye
there was a transitory gleam offish scattering, memory dispersing, coming
together—the smell of ocean, warm grass bending away from a salt-wind. Beneath
the rumble and the shiver of the mountain, beyond his breathing, beyond the
blocky, interlocking segments of the Ancient warning, he could see blank-eyed
faces turned away from the sea.

“Easter,” Daniel said again, more firmly, nodding.

“Easter,” Jack repeated, his voice thin and breathy with not shouting. “As in
bunny?”

Daniel turned to him, smiling, but the smile faded when he saw Jack’s face.
The hiss of wind in grass was lost to the grinding of the mine, the mass of the
planet bearing down on them. Daniel leaned against the door again, let it take
his weight. “As in Island,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. We should’ve tried to take him.” Sam winced as she made a final turn with the strip torn from the hem of Teal’c’s
t-shirt and pulled the knot gently, binding the Colonel’s little finger to the
next one.

“Ow,” he said dully, as though by rote. Then: “It’s only a broken finger,
Major. Save the heroics for the big stuff.”

Sam looked up from her task and nodded toward the faint shimmer of the force
field. Beyond it, Daniel was standing like he had been for the last twenty
minutes: head thrown back, lips moving around unvoiced words, eyes roaming the
text on the door. “If we’d acted then, maybe we wouldn’t be here now,” she said.
“Tactically, this position is way worse.”

“Thanks,” the Colonel answered and pushed her hands away as she made some
final adjustments. “Insightful analysis.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I got it, Major. Things suck. Pretty much par for the course.” He started to
rub the back of his neck with his damaged hand but grimaced at the sting of pain
and stopped. “Any minute now some Jaffa’s going to come in here and be totally
humorless and make us kneel.” He got up, walked a few paces and flicked the
field experimentally, then sucked on his tingling finger. “I hate kneeling.”

“As do I,” Teal’c said. He was sitting against the rock wall with his eyes
closed. One of his hands rested on his stomach above his pouch, fingers kneading
it slowly. There was a faint crease between his eyebrows.

“Well, it’s not like you had to do it a lot in your former life,” Jack said,
and Teal’c smiled at him, ever so slightly.

Sam wasn’t too enthralled by the idea of another audience with a Goa’uld
either. Taking the Colonel’s cue, she rubbed her neck and rolled her shoulders.
There was a whopper of a headache looming at the back of her skull, and the
pulsing shudder of the mine wasn’t helping. Probably dehydration, she told
herself, or low blood sugar.

The single MRE packet Aris had thrown into the makeshift cell with them lay
beside her, open and empty.

For his part, Aris was finishing his second MRE and starting on the third. He
tapped Daniel on the shoulder and asked, “What’s this one?”

Daniel gave it a distracted glance. “Uh, macaroni.”

“Is that good?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the text. “If you like chicken.”

Sighing a little wistfully, Sam pressed her index finger onto empty foil and
picked up a crumb of granola.

When it was halfway to her mouth, the Colonel said, “Are you going to share
that with the rest of us?”

She met his eyes and put her finger on her tongue. He turned away with a
small frown, and she felt a tremor of satisfaction, even though her brain was
throbbing and too big for her head. The nice little fantasy about daiquiris and
nachos she started to build was interrupted by a kick to the side of her boot.

“What?” she snapped.

“What,
sir,”
he corrected.

“Whatever,” she muttered under her breath and went back to cleaning crumbs
off of the wrapper.

“Excuse me?”

“Whatever,
sir
.”

The Colonel was scowling down at her. “What’s behind that door?” he demanded.

She looked up at him and shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t know.”
I don’t have X-ray vision,
she added to herself. “Something the Ancients don’t
want anybody to get at, obviously.” There was a sort of sickly pulsing in her
eyeballs, and her mouth tasted like bright copper.

“Like what?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s quarantined. Maybe there’s a really
nasty bug in there. Like the one that killed them off.”

“A weapon,” Teal’c said, without opening his eyes. “Something of great power
that they wish to safeguard for their return.”

O’Neill aimed his finger at him. “Yeah. I like Teal’c’s idea.”

“You would,” she said, this time not quite far enough under her breath and
the Colonel’s scowl came back to the power often.

On the other side of the force field, Aris was choking down his stolen
macaroni and cheese while watching his prisoners. Daniel was oblivious, still in
the same pose, only now one of his hands was following his eyes across the text,
like he was trying to snatch the meaning out of the air in front of him. The
rumbling vibration of the crushers was making her butt numb, but the Colonel was
standing up near the shield and Teal’c’s legs were sticking out and she had no
space at all for her own legs and everyone else had dibs on space and good ideas
and she was empty, full of nothing but “yes, sirs” and “I don’t knows”, like
somebody else lived in her head, their orders, their intentions—

“You
would
?” Another kick on the side of her boot.

She glared up at him.
His
orders,
his
plans,
his
intentions. “Maybe it’s not a weapon. Who knows why the Ancients would lock
something up? Maybe it’s somebody’s garage for all we know.” She was tired of
saluting by reflex like her arms didn’t even belong to her, like somebody inside
was pulling strings, like Jolinar was using her voice and looking at Sam in the
mirror and thinking “me”—

Rolling onto her hip, she leaned over low and retched up one third of an MRE.

The Colonel crouched in the narrow space and brushed her hair back with the
good fingers of his left hand.

“Don’t feel so good, sir,” she gasped. When he pressed the canteen against
her arm she took it and allowed herself a small sip. It was mostly empty.

“That makes two of us,” he said, giving her neck a pat.

“Three of us,” Teal’c added.

She raised her head and gave the Colonel a thin smile of apology. Aris was
still watching.

“Better pick up the pace, doctor,” he suggested to Daniel, and finished the
last of the MRE.

Daniel’s eyes were starting to throb with the force of the headache twisting through his brain. He pulled his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.
The intertwined glyphs had taken on a uniformity he couldn’t unravel, and they
marched behind his eyelids even when his eyes were closed. He was acutely aware
of his teammates a few feet away; his fingers twitched with sympathetic pain for
Jack’s injury. He would have to think faster, or make a convincing argument as
to why he hadn’t made more progress. Lying might work, if he knew what lie to
dish out or what Jack had in mind from this point forward. Options were
nonexistent, it seemed, but his perspective was limited to the wall, and the
Ancients’ warning, and his fear for his teammates.

He squinted up at the silent message, then pressed his palms flat against the
cool metal. The glyphs were similar to the
rongo rongo
of Easter Island,
but it made no sense—Easter Island had been populated a mere 1500 years, a
drop in the bucket compared to the Ancients and the Goa’uld. He sighed.
Polynesian culture was not a specialty he’d ever cared to pursue in more than a
superficial way, and he had no reference tools at all to consult. “Maybe what’s
there developed independently on and offworld from something much older,” he
said out loud.

“Talking to yourself?” Aris asked. Daniel slipped his glasses back on,
ignoring the twinge of pain that shot through his temples, and took a long look
at Aris’ face.

“Sometimes it helps to solve a puzzle if I trace the parts out loud,” he
said, without any expectation that Aris would understand. “I need a few minutes
rest. To think it over.”

“Rest standing up,” Aris said, and pointed to the wall. “Feel free to lean.”

Daniel shifted his glance across the chamber, to Sam’s pale face, then to
Teal’c, whose eyes were closed. Finally he met Jack’s eyes. Somehow he was going
to have to find out if Jack had a plan to get them out of this. Even an attempt
at escape was better than nothing, and he knew at this point Jack’s focus was on
that and nothing else. To Aris, he said, “Just a few minutes.”

“You humans are so needy,” Aris said, as he rose from his perch at Daniel’s
side. “It’s amazing you ever figured out the Stargate system in the first place.”

“Yes, isn’t it,” Daniel said, pushing back a flare of personal irritation.

Jack stood as they approached, his bandaged hand dangling at his side.
“Daniel?” he said, eyeing Aris. “Everything all right?”

“Peachy,” Daniel said. Aris hovered right behind him. “I’m not making much
progress.” He glanced at Jack’s hand. “How’re you guys doing?”

“The sooner we get out of here, the better,” Jack said, nodding toward
Teal’c, who sat sweaty and still in the corner. “I don’t like this place,” he
added, adding a tight smile to punctuate the understatement.

“Is there anything I can do to help, Daniel?” Sam pushed up from the ground
and brushed her hands off on her BDUs.

Jack shot her an annoyed look. “How about if you wait until I give you the
go-ahead, there, Carter?”

“Just trying to help, sir,” she said, but the frown that creased her forehead
matched her clipped tone.

“Guys?” Daniel said, looking from one to the other. The tension ratcheted up
tenfold as they stared at one another. “What’s going on?”

“Carter here thinks she’s running her own show,” Jack said. “She’s been at it
all day.”

“She has not.” From behind Daniel, Teal’c’s voice rose, and they turned to
see him watching them. “You are mistaken, O’Neill. Major Carter only offered her
assistance.”

Jack turned to him. “You haven’t been
right
since Apophis brainwashed
you, have you? How many times have you switched sides? How do we know that you
won’t turn on us again?”

“Jack!” Daniel said. He reached out a hand to grip Jack’s arm, to get his
attention, but the force field flared red between them and sent a sizzling jolt
up Daniel’s arm. Daniel stepped back, knocking into Aris, who shoved him away
and retreated a few paces, all the better to hold weapons on them.