SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne

by Savile, Steven

  But it would not die.

  Not alone.

  Not like this.

  So it scavenged and it made a nest deep down in the dark out of the fire, down where the fungi and the lichen clung to the sticky wet heat of the stones, safe. It survived on the spores, for every mouthful it ate spreading another out so that more might grow in its place. It lost time — or the sense of it — day and night ceased to be of any importance. Instead it judged its place in the world by the rumbles of the lava and the gasses trapped deeper beneath the crust, venting their rage as the pressures built up beyond the ground’s ability to cage them. At first it had counted the eruptions but when the numbers rose into the meaningless it gave up.

  And through it all it was alone.

  Until the woman came.

  It had thought she was different. She didn’t judge it. She didn’t fear it. She had found it down here stumbling around in the darkness and followed it back to its nest. She had helped it. She had soothed it. She had shared herself with it willingly, letting it into her mind so that it could taste all she held dear, so that it could understand her losses and her pains, her hopes, fears, and the needs that drove her. And it did understand. They were kindred creatures for all their differences. They were cut from the same spiritual cloth. They sought to help, only ever to help.

  It had sung to her, not with words because it had forgotten the shapes of so many of them, but with harmonics, resonances it found pleasing. She had smiled and, touching its rough cheek, promised that she would protect it, that it didn’t have to be alone, and even as she lied to the Mujina and said it was safe, the others had come. Those she feared most in the world. It had sought them out, creeping closer so that it might taste their minds and learn their dreams and desires, but they were dark. The creature knew it could never be safe. Not with the others here. So it had tried to trick them for her, but one among them was stronger. It did not fall for the Mujina’s mind games. With its power broken, the outsider had the others bind and gag it, robbing the Mujina of its sight and voice and effectively locking it out of their minds — and for once the Mujina did not want to help, it did not want the woman to come find it and save it, it wanted only to be left alone…

  And was rewarded.

  She had left it, like all of the others before her, all promises forgotten, broken. It was ever the same, the Mujina fated to be alone, it thought bitterly. But that was not fair. The others had hunted the woman to extinction. She had not left willingly. Her only crime was that she had not come back.

  So it pressed its back up against the warm wet stones and rocked slowly forwards and back, forwards and back, each time a little further forward, a little harder back, until the rough points of the stone dug into its flesh. It needed to feel physical pain. Nothing else would block out the spiritual hurt.

  It screamed out into the dark, a wretched, primal cry torn from its ragged lips.

  It was alone.

  Again.

  How long would it be before others came through the dead eye looking for it? How many more eruptions would it count off before the eye lit up blue with its own fire? How much longer would it be before she came back to it?

  It cried silent tears into the rough cloth covering its face, and sang again the song it had sung for her, hoping somehow she would hear the harmonics and come back to it.

  It was never meant to be alone.

  Chapter Seven

  What Price Victory?

  SG-1 kitted up.

  Daniel sat with Jerichau learning all he could about the prison planet. The woman was fascinating. Quite unlike many of the Tok’ra they had encountered. For one thing, she had a sense of humor. He had rather enjoyed seeing Jack squirm while she toyed with him. It was usually Daniel’s role to play tongue-tied and twisted whereas Jack was always so together. It was part of that bad-boy charm of his. It was funny, with all this talk of archetypes, he couldn’t help but think of them in the same vein. He had thought it would be easy to hang a label on each of them, Jack the hero, dynamic and strong, Teal’c the shapeshifter who had begun his time in the shadows only to come over to the light, Daniel himself as the mentor, offering knowledge instead of brawn, and Sam another aspect of the teacher, like Daniel but then so unlike him, but their roles weren’t remotely so straightforward. Sometimes Teal’c wore the mantel of hero, at other times Sam, or Daniel himself. It was as though collectively they owned the attributes of the hero, the best and the worst, and together they were so much more than the sum of their parts.

  But then that was what being a part of a team like SG-1 was all about, wasn’t it?

  Vasaveda lacked a breathable atmosphere: indeed if everything Jerichau said was the truth they were about to willingly enter a Miltonesque landscape of Paradise most certainly lost. She talked of a world so harsh it beggared belief; volcanic fissures venting steam, red lava leaking out of the ground as though the planet itself wept for the Hell it had become. She described wonders that resonated with the Christian iconography of that blasted place, the unending barren wasteland, the unbearable heat, the volatility of the oxygen in the air that caused the sky itself to ignite in flame and burn for days on end. He listened to it all and understood that no amount of planning or forethought could prepare them for Vasaveda. She was painting a picture of a place so wretched it was impossible to imagine finding it inhabited at all. The worst of it, though, was her contention that the Ancients had somehow made it that way, and that it had not always been so.

  “We believe the Mujina has taken refuge in an elaborate subterranean network not far from the Stargate itself. Nyren Var’s transmission was cryptic: see the world through the old man’s eyes.”

  “Well that makes a lot of sense,” Daniel said.

  “It is all we have, but hopefully it will be clear when you arrive on the prison planet.”

  She wrote out seven symbols on the scrap of paper Daniel placed on the table between them. “The co-ordinates to hell,” he said to himself as he studied them. He felt a thrill of fear chase down the ladder of his spine as he picked the paper up. It wasn’t just that the place she described so vividly unnerved him, far from it actually — he’d been to hell and back before and it could hardly be worse than Ne’tu. No, it was the thought of bringing back the Mujina that placed a chill in his heart, because of all of them, Daniel Jackson understood the implications of a creature that could twist itself to represent all things to all people. History was riddled with examples of power corrupted. In each of those cases there was nothing supernatural to amplify them. If mankind alone was capable of such darkness, what was it capable of with a creature like the Mujina at its side?

  They were going into the Ninth Circle, fully intending to hunt the devil and, if they were lucky, drag him back out with them. It didn’t bear thinking about, so of course it was all he could think about.

  “It can’t be allowed to fall into the hands of the Goa’uld, surely you understand that?” the softer voice of Selina Ros said. He had noticed the symbiote had a habit of allowing its host to rise to the surface when the conversation turned uncomfortably moral. But then, perhaps everything in its world was starkly black and white?

  “I just can’t help thinking it’s a case of damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” Daniel said, surprising himself with his honesty.

  “Isn’t that always the way?” she said, sounding unerringly like Jack. It was precisely the sort of thing he would say.

  “But it shouldn’t be, should it?” he didn’t know who he was trying to convince, himself or the Tok’ra. “Sometimes there should just be a right thing to do.”

  “It would make life simpler. But — ”

  “There’s always a but,” he finished for her, as though that were all she could possibly have to say on the matter. She nodded. Her faint smile didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “We need to join the others.”

  “You will do the right thing, Daniel Jackson,” she said, as though that were meant to comfort him. It didn’t.<
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  “And that’s where the problem lies.”

  He took the co-ordinates through to Hammond in the command room so that they could be input into the dialing computer. Jack and Teal’c were already there. The towering Jaffa gave him a curious look, his brow furrowing slightly around the gold glyph that marked him Jaffa. It left Daniel with the disconcerting feeling that his thoughts had been scoured, leaving his doubts red and raw on the surface. He tried to shrug it off. Now wasn’t the time to unburden himself to the others. Selina Ros was right; the Mujina could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Goa’uld. The implications did not bear thinking about.

  “Something wrong?” Jack asked.

  “No more than usual,” Daniel said, managing a wry smile. “Jerichau has been telling me what to expect from this prison planet.” He told them what she had said, skimming over some of the more colorful images but making damned sure he got the point across.

  “As ideas go, this is sounding worse and worse,” Jack commented, fastening one of the straps on the sleeve of his evac suit.

  “Indeed,” Teal’c said. “I have heard speak of such phenomena. I believe it is quite beautiful to see the sky aflame.”

  “I’m sure it’s beautiful, T-man. I’m more worried about the practicalities than the aesthetics. Things like how much heat is going to be generated from the oxygen burn off and what, exactly, it’s likely to do to us. The idea of being vaporized because I spent too long staring at the sun doesn’t really appeal all that much. Not sure I want to go to my grave with a burning sky being the last thing I see, it’s a little too biblical, if you get my meaning.”

  “You do not wish to die,” Teal’c said flatly, his flair for stating the obvious not letting him down. It earned a smile from Jack.

  “Atta boy, Teal’c. Daniel, go get suited up.”

  He nodded. Daniel walked toward the closed door, and then turned, as though pulled up by a sudden thought. “Jack?”

  O’Neill turned to look at him. Daniel wanted nothing more than to take him to one side and share his misgivings about what they were getting involved in. “Something bothering you?”

  Daniel shrugged. “Hard to say.” Of course, it wasn’t, it was easy to say, what was hard was to live with the consequences of what he had to say.

  “Spit it out, Daniel.”

  “All right, here’s the thing,” Daniel said. “Are we sure we want to do this? I mean, have we thought through the implications of bringing this creature back with us? Are we talking about trying to keep it a prisoner here, trading one cell for another? And if we aren’t, then what? It isn’t as though we can drop it off at Disney World and tell it to go sightseeing. And the only other option I can come up with turns us into a death squad. So, what are we going to do? And don’t say find it and worry about it later. The Ancients hid the Mujina for a reason: they understood the threat it posed.”

  “So what do you suggest, Daniel?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. I can’t see any good coming out of this. The Tok’ra called it a weapon, but it’s worse than that; you can choose not to detonate a bomb or put the safety on a gun, but how do you stop this creature from being what it is? How do you stop it from finding the one thing it knows you will respond to, and giving it to you? Kill it? That’s not what we are, is it? Or did we become the Tok’ra’s assassins when I wasn’t looking?” Daniel screwed his face up. He’d said it. He hadn’t intended to, but looking at his friend he’d not been able to stop himself. He owed it to Jack to speak up. Besides, of them all, Jack was surely the most likely to respond to the creature — after all, there was enough need in him to fuel an army of Mujinas.

  “No one is killing anything,” Jack said, and Daniel almost believed him, but Jack was a soldier — he had to know it came down to assessing a credible threat and removing that threat if there was no alternative. The Mujina could not be allowed to fall into Goa’uld hands, but neither could it be allowed fall into human hands. It didn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to picture a Mayberry or a Kinsey with something like the Mujina by their side, and imagine the reflection their flawed humanity would conjure from the creature. Jack had to know full well that mankind was every bit as dangerous as anything the stars could bring down. And if he knew, then his promise had to be a lie. A well intentioned lie, but a lie just the same. “We’re on a Search and Rescue, let’s find this creature, extract it, and get back home. We can worry about the “What If’s” when we’ve made sure it can’t fall into Goa’uld hands. That’s a promise, okay? But until then we have got our orders.”

  “All right, Jack,” he said, closing the door of the command room behind him.

  Chapter Eight

  Jet Black Sunrise

  Iblis strode purposefully through the dank corridor. This, he thought, and not for the first time in the year since he had awoken, is the hive of power? This filth-ridden place? It was laughable. These Corvani had no class. They were like grubs crawling about in their own excreta. How they had risen above the Kelani amazed him. But then, the Kelani were hardly more developed than the average monkey. He looked back at Kelkus trailing along behind him, sniffing and sniveling in his footsteps. Monkey, yes, that was an appropriate comparison. Iblis was tired of the wretched human, but as long as he served a purpose he would allow the man to live. He needed a disciple, and Kelkus had proven just that. Willing to do anything to spread Iblis’ influence in the Court of the Raven King without risk of exposing his nature, allowing Iblis to plant the seeds of unrest and greed he thrived upon. But it hurt him, all of this sneaking about. He battled with his ego, wanting to stride these corridors as god, as was his right. In time, he promised himself. In time. As it was, he had his own role to play and for the moment it was every bit as sycophantic as Kelkus’s.

  What have I become? he asked himself. He didn’t know the answer.

  He pushed open the door to the throne room. The light streamed down in bright unbroken beams from the dozen sky-light windows around the high ceiling. Dust motes danced their dervish swirl, trapped in the beams. It was a solitary thing of beauty in a place of ugliness.

  Iblis had no time for beauty.

  Corvus Keen sat in the center on his chair of dead birds, his wolfhound at his feet. The man was a bloated slug, folds of fat oozing across the arms of his ostentatious chair. Iblis had to stifle the urge to laugh at the pomp with which the man dressed his world. From a distance it almost looked majestic but as he moved closer the grease and the fat stains became more noticeable. The throne was fashioned from the skulls and wings of hundreds upon hundreds of crushed and broken ravens. It was a vile construction and it stank as only carrion could. Keen sat there, drumming his fat fingers on the tiny skulls of the birds. He was surrounded on all sides by his cronies bowing and scraping and telling him what he wanted to hear. Behind them huge black velvet drapes were emblazoned with a silver sigil, Corvus Keen’s wing-spread bird. He had taken to calling himself the Raven King recently. It was an aspect of the man’s psychosis that Iblis nurtured. He seemed to truly believe that he was evolving into something greater than human. Keen wore a cloak of feathers. The gore still clung to the tips of some. It was decidedly primitive beside the crisply tailored black and silver uniforms of his soldiers.

  The chamber was full. Iblis tasted tension in the air. This was good. Keen was nothing if not unpredictable, which made for curious entertainments in his domain. Iblis wondered what little delight the man had in mind for today? Torture probably. It usually was.

  The crowd melted away from Iblis, allowing him to walk slowly toward the throne. He stopped at the foot of the dais and knelt, slowly, but without bowing his head, and rose. It pained him to pretend loyalty to any human. No, pain was too prosaic a term; it burned him to bend the knee. He was Goa’uld. He was no mere toady. But he could bury his nature a while longer and wear the mask of follower while it suited him. He had plans. Such plans. Keen owned these souls. Iblis owned Keen. He could live without their devotion for now.


  The secret was in the game itself. Iblis was patient. He had laid out a long game. In the year since he had awoken and taken this host he had mapped out an immaculate strategy. He would not fail. When the time came he would snap Corvus Keen as easily as he would one of the human’s brittle birds. There was no rush. At least not while Keen was useful to him.

  The fat man was being entertained by a nervous juggler. Everything stopped as Iblis approached the fat man. Iblis inclined his head and smiled wryly. “Please, do carry on,” he muttered, and all eyes turned on the sweating fool as he coughed slightly and shuffled his feet.

  “What are you waiting for? You heard the man, entertain us.”

  The fool hurled his clubs up into the air above his head and scrabbled to catch them. Too high, and too hard, their arc took them out of easy reach. Sweat beaded on the fool’s face. Iblis enjoyed the look of rapture on Keen’s features as he watched the perspiration run into the fool’s eyes. It will all end in tears, Iblis thought rather smugly, but then tears were Corvus Keen’s preferred currency when it came to settling debts, so that was hardly surprising. A wooden club clattered on the marbled floor. As one, Corvus Keen’s hungry court of vultures sucked in their breath. The huge wolfhound at Keen’s feet looked up at the sudden absence of sound. Seeing nothing worthy of its attention it settled down to doze again. Like its master, the dog’s fat jowls dribbled spittle as it breathed. Keen scratched the dog between the ears. It was curious how the man could look so much like the beast, and ever more so the longer they spent in each other’s company.

  Iblis looked at the juggler.

  “You are a tedious man, Fool,” Keen rasped. “What can you do that is more interesting? Watching you throw your clubs in the air is sending me to sleep. We have to make things more exciting. I know, you’re going to juggle, Fool, but you are going to do it like your life depends on it. Between barks from Senisia here, you drop a club you lose a finger, understand? If you make it you walk away with your fingers and fifty Raqs for your trouble. Now, pick up your clubs.”