“So break them down.”
“We don’t interfere in business that isn’t
Seachrání
.”
Jack’s retort died on his tongue. The man’s words echoed his own feelings too closely; sometimes you just had to take care of your own.
“Settle down, Pádraig,” said Faelan. “We won’t be breaking down any doors.”
“Why did you even come here, Faelan?” said Rhionna.
“Don’t –”
“Your warnings are just words, if you don’t take action. O’Neill is right—bring your people here, lead us all into the Ark.”
He shook his head.
“Help me help these people, Faelan. You know you could. You won’t even try!”
His face hardened and he turned away, snatching his hat up from the bench where he’d sat. “Burn’s almost over. We need to get back to the ship.” He stalked to the door. A jerk of his head summoned Pádraig to follow.
* * *
Daniel scrambled to his feet as the flap shut behind Faelan, grabbing his camcorder from the ground. “I’m going with him.”
“I don’t think so.” Jack looked stubborn beneath his Wiley-X shades.
“Just to the docks. We didn’t even ask him about the shield.” Daniel slipped his own sunglasses on, plunging the dim shack into even deeper gloom. “This could be our only chance, Jack.”
At his side, he saw Teal’c rise. “I shall accompany him, O’Neill.”
“Me too.” Sam got up too, she looked hot and uncomfortable, and Daniel figured she wanted some fresh air as much as he did. As fresh as you could get in this furnace of a place. “I’d like to check out the technology on their boats, sir. I think they might be using some kind of solar technology which could possibly be transferable to—”
“Okay.” Jack held up a hand, cutting her off. “We’ll all go.”
But as he started to head for the door, Sorcha reached out her hand and clasped his arm. “Wait.”
Jack looked down; Daniel didn’t even know how he could see her through his sunglasses in the gloomy shack. “What?”
“I would speak with you, Colonel O’Neill. We have matters to discuss.”
Jack rubbed at the back of his neck, then with a sigh said, “Sure, why not?” He jerked his head toward Daniel. “Keep in touch.”
Fishing his hat out of a pocket, Daniel nodded. “Will do.”
He’d just turned to leave when Rhionna moved past him. Sweat stained the bandanna tied about her head, and she pulled her goggles on before he could make eye contact. Her face was set, somewhere between anger and hurt. “I’ll show you down to the docks,” she said, slipping out into the glare.
Daniel followed in silence. Suspecting that she had other motives for her decision to follow Faelan Garret, he didn’t point out that the docks would be hard to miss.
Outside the heat was fierce. The Burn might be over, but it still felt like being caught between a hammer and an anvil. Even through his boots he could feel the scorching earth. “How do they survive in this?” he asked, half to himself and half to Rhionna.
“They don’t,” she said, not turning around. “Not for long. Life expectancy here is very short—too much disease, most of it caused by the Burn. Everyone has cankers on their skin, many are blind, especially the children. The sunlight damages their eyes, burns away their sight.”
“I can feel it,” Sam said from behind them. “I can feel my hands burning.” She was looking down at her fingers, turning them over in the glare. “You want some sunblock, Daniel?”
At that word, Rhionna turned. “Sunblock?”
Sam pulled a tube of factor 50 from her vest. “It can prevent sun damage to your skin,” she told Rhionna, squeezing some into her hand. “It prevents the harmful light reaching it.”
Rhionna regarded her. “Your people have great Knowledge, do they not?”
“About some things,” Sam said. “That’s the kind of thing we could share with your people.”
In the distance, down at the water’s edge, a commotion had broken out. Faelan was talking in heated tones to Pádraig, who was overseeing the unloading of a mishmash of plastic containers. Impatient to be gone, Faelan was gesturing toward the boats. His comrade remained stalwart, meeting temper with folded arms and a phlegmatic shrug. It reminded Daniel of Jack railing at Teal’c.
Rhionna made a sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Pádraig is one of the few men who can stand his ground against Faelan.”
“You managed pretty well,” Daniel said.
“For all the good it did.” Rhionna turned away and continued to walk down to the docks.
“Touchy,” Sam said, offering Daniel the sun block as they watched Rhionna pick her way through the shanty town. Several children darted out of the shade as she passed, hanging onto her hands and following her toward the sea. They were thin and wiry, their skin dry and damaged.
“I think I might be touchy too, living here,” Daniel said. On impulse he pulled out his camcorder, capturing the children who fled into doorways and under drooping eaves to avoid the sun. One of them stumbled and fell, turning blind eyes to the camera as he scrambled upright and disappeared into the shadows of a shack. Daniel felt his heart constrict, pumping anger with every beat.
“I know what you mean,” Sam agreed with a sigh. Then she tapped him on the shoulder and started walking again. “Come on, I want to check out that solar technology before Faelan leaves.”
Trailing along, he kept his camera rolling as they made their way past the flimsy shacks that made up this flotsam city. Daniel tried not to think about a storm raging through the Badlands, with seas rising and the wind screeching like a banshee. You didn’t need much imagination to see the whole place swept away like so much garbage.
How Jack could pretend it was none of their business he couldn’t fathom, not for a moment. And he’d be damned if he’d leave these people to their fate, whatever Jack O’Neill had to say on the matter.
* * *
“You don’t want to be here,” Sorcha said, sitting back on her heels and watching the man called O’Neill as he ducked back in to her home. “In this shack,” she said, flicking her wrist to encompass all. “Or on this world.”
For the first time since they had met, he pulled the sunwear from his face. The eyes beneath were penetrating, but gave away little—as guarded by nature as they had been by the glasses. “In my experience,” he said, “sticking your nose into other people’s business never ends well. All we want is the lowdown on this shield.”
“You see how we live—how they live inside the Ark. Do you feel no pity, no outrage?”
“I’ve seen a lot of things, in a lot of places.” His expression hardened. “And paid the price for getting involved.”
She spread her hands. “Then we face an impasse, O’Neill. For I know much of the shield, but what incentive do I have to speak of it, if there is no gain for me or my people?”
O’Neill’s face twisted and he scrubbed a hand through graying hair. It was strange to see such a shade, for most men of the Badlands were dead long before their hair turned silver, victims of disease or the Burn. “What do you want from us?” he asked, turning away and lifting the door flap to peer outside. “Sure, we could send medicine and food, but the gate’s inside the city and I’m betting Ennis isn’t going to deliver.”
“Pastor Ennis,” she spat onto the floor, “would see us all burn, if he had his way.”
Where O’Neill had lifted the door flap the sun cut a harsh line into her shack. Sorcha edged away from it. “We don’t need your food or medicine; there is plenty within the Ark.”
He dropped the flap, and the shack fell back into shadow. “Then go get it. There’s got to be thousands of people here. Just go into the city and take what you need.”
She barked a dry laugh. “So easy as that?”
“Why not?”
“My people are already defeated, O’Neill. They need someone to show them that the battle is worth fighting. They need a leader.”
In the gloom she could make out only half his face. Just enough to see him frown. “Rhionna?”
Sorcha shrugged. “Rhionna has done her best, but the Badlanders can be prejudiced too. Sometimes they see only a woman of rank and privilege who will one day become Pastor, just like her father. When that day comes, she says she will bring change, but even then she shall have the Elect to deal with. She cannot help us on her own.”
“And what is it you think we can do to help?”
She looked up at him, searching for the dark glint of his eyes. “Find
Sciath Dé
, and make it work
.
”
He regarded her in silence. From outside she could hear the calls of people at the dock, the clink of rigging on the ships moored there, the thud of skins of whale oil being unloaded. The
Seachrání
had come to trade, then, as well as warn.
“This shield,” O’Neill said at last, “what is it?”
“It is the last hope for our world,” she admitted, her heart pattering at the risk she was taking.
“Last hope how?”
“
Sciath Dé
was made in the time Time Before, to protect Ierna from the power of our sun.”
A flash of recognition crossed O’Neill’s face, swiftly followed by suspicion. “Shield of the Gods,” he said, low, as if he spoke to himself. “Let me guess, it was given to you by your ‘Lord’?”
Sorcha shook her head. “Pastor Channon will tell you it was made by apostates to thwart the Lord’s will.” She gave a sour smile. “Since His will is that the damned succumb to the Burn I cannot be sorry for that.” Narrowing her eyes, she endeavored to read O’Neill’s expression. “But I think you have seen such a thing before?”
“Something like it,” he said, evasive now. “You wanna tell me what it looks like? Big column of orange light shooting up into the sky? That kinda thing?”
“
Sciath Dé
failed, Jack O’Neill. No one now living has seen it, few even believe in its existence.”
“And what about the Goa’uld? You believe in them?”
“I know nothing of your enemies,” Sorcha said, spreading her hands to show the truth. “All I know is that the seas rose and all of Ierna was lost. All but the Ark and the fanatics who stole our refuge for themselves.”
O’Neill’s shoulders rose and fell, as though he were sighing in resignation. “That’s why the Ark is half empty then?”
“Those who have,” Sorcha said, “fear those who have not. In our faces, they see their own fate and dread it. So we must build a future for ourselves, here beyond the Ark—once
Sciath Dé
can shield us from the sun.”
“And what makes you think we can help you?”
“Because you have been to
Acarsaid Dorch
, because you have brought from there the Knowledge that we have lost.”
O’Neill shook his head. “I’m sorry, we’re not here to—”
“Would you turn your back?” Desperation made her angry, but she strove to hide her temper as she scrambled to her feet. Though O’Neill towered over her she was not afraid. Let him kill her if he would, it mattered not; she knew in her bones that, if these strangers did not help, no other chance would come in her lifetime. “Would you return to your world and leave us here, O’Neill, as those in the Ark do? Would you close the gates to us and let us die?”
“There are thousands of you out here,” he said, “why don’t you storm the Ark? Make them let you in?”
“You have seen their soldiers. Would we fight them with our bare hands?”
“Yes!”
“Folly,” she spat. “As you well know, O’Neill.”
He glared at her, then turned away. His back was stiff and she could hear him suck in a breath and let it out. “This isn’t our fight,” he said. “This isn’t why we came here.”
“You came here to find
Sciath Dé
,” Sorcha said. “And that is all that I ask of you now.”
Without turning around he said, “I take it you know where it is?”
In silence, she moved to her sleeping pallet. From beneath it she withdraw the small book in which she wrote the truths she had learned. It was her most precious possession, and she had no intention of giving it to this man. Nursing it as she sat, she said to him, “First, you must know of the Cove. There our secrets are hidden. Rooms upon rooms of secrets, most lost to the sea. But some are still dry and from them I have woven my theories. Faelan thinks those the wild ramblings of an old woman, but he is a child of the sea and takes no interest in past times. But I… I would know more, Jack O’Neill. I would know more of a world where land spread to the far horizon and people roamed it, as the
moil mór
roam the sea.”
O’Neill looked back at her, a slight grimace crossing his face
as he moved; his knee, she suspected, carried an old wound. “That’s what it was like here then, back in the day?”
“Does it sound farfetched? Have you ever seen such vast stretches of land?”
He paused for a moment, and Sorcha realized she was holding her breath. Then, with a curt nod, he said, “Yeah, pretty much every place I’ve been.”
“Oh…” She sighed, grief and joy combined. “Then it is true—the legends of the Time Before are real.”
“Do you know what caused it, this flood?”