SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne

by Savile, Steven

  The camp illustrated it all on a microcosmic scale. He could see the triumph of spirit as the rescuers fought the elements to recover buried instrumentation from within one of the collapsed igloos. Six of them clawed away at the ice even as a second smaller tremor rippled through the heaving ground. It was a peculiar sensation. The horizon appeared to roll, all of the disorientation rising up from beneath Daniel Jackson’s feet. All around him, men from the camp worked together without a word. There was an almost hive-like mentality to it, with Jahamat as the queen bee in the center of it all.

  Jack threw himself into the heart of it, risking his own safety without so much as a second thought, which was so like him. But Daniel noticed the way he seemed to gravitate toward Jahamat as the need for help moved across the temporary settlement. That almost certainly meant O’Neill’s efforts were far from selfless acts of heroism. He was ingratiating himself, being seen to be at least one man’s savior. Daniel watched Jack a little while longer. There was a lot to be admired in the man. Indeed he was not dissimilar to the Mujina in the way that he inspired those around him to want to please him. The notion of Jack O’Neill as an ancient mystical creature brought a smile to Daniel’s face. Jack was about as unmystical as they came.

  And yet the Asgard had named an ill-fated ship after the man.

  The more Daniel thought about it, the more he realized what a fair comparison it actually was.

  Across the camp, Sam and Teal’c labored hard and with no less disregard for the risk. Rather than join them, Daniel hung back slightly from the rescue efforts, watching the others watching the Mujina. There was something Messianic in the way they responded to the creature, even Teal’c.

  It was fascinating to see.

  Daniel turned his attention from the worshippers to the worshipped for a moment, and again felt that haunting sense of the Messianic. He thought of all the charismatic leaders he had ever encountered, from the icons on the silver screen to the demagogues who owned their people heart and soul. All of them, he reasoned, possessed that same Svengali-like surety and owned that same connection with their subjects.

  The memory of Orwell’s Oceania was not one he wanted to live out in reality.

  He could all too easily imagine John the Baptist on the beaches, making his impassioned speeches to crowds hungry to understand his new message of hope; or, at the other end of time, Kennedy promising to end the escalation of the Cold War on the balcony of Berlin’s Rathaus Schöneberg. Omar al-Bashir, Kim Jong-Il, Ríos Montt and so many of the world’s oppressive regimes, Batista and Stroessner, Pol Pot and Nikolai Chauchescu, Ho Chi Minh and Bin Laden, and even Saddam Hussein; men with the power to coerce men to kill for them, or die for them and what they believed in. It was all too easy to transfer the Mujina’s charismatic magic to them, and understand the implications of what was already happening here in the few hours since their capture.

  “He’s not the Messiah,” Daniel muttered beneath his breath, holding off on the obvious Pythonesque end of the quote. None of the others were close enough to appreciate it anyway.

  Down in the heart of it O’Neill turned, shading his eyes against the sun. Daniel did likewise, following the direction of his gaze. Behind him, through a deep vee slashed into the ice-mountain, he saw a lone man silhouetted against the sky. It was impossible to see his face from this distance, but his excitement was almost palpable, even from so far away. He came running down the mountain.

  Daniel knew precisely what it meant: they had found the Stargate.

  * * *

  The echoes of the blasting caps had finally silenced. Jahamat’s men had blasted open the cave network but they didn’t have the heavy machinery to lift the naquadah ring so for now, at least, it was still anchored in place. Jahamat assured them they would be back, with the machinery, when the time came. In the mean time they were ensuring that the cave wouldn’t remain hidden any longer. Even now, away from the gate, the look of almost reverential awe on each of their faces made it appear as though they were in the grip of some holy revelation. Rapture. Daniel wondered if they had even the slightest idea of what the Stargate represented, what it actually was, or if they simply thought they had discovered some ancient artifact.

  Both Jahamat and the Mujina walked toward them. Daniel had no liking for the way the creature had attached itself to the Corvani leader. It leaned in and whispered something in the man’s ear. Daniel had heard those same whispers himself and knew just how seductive they could be. The Mujina was no doubt telling Jahamat exactly what he wanted to hear — but in a way that served the Mujina and the Mujina alone.

  The way the Corvani’s smile spread across his face sent a shiver of trepidation down the ladder of Daniel’s spine. There was nothing even remotely healthy about the expression.

  O’Neill followed the pair of them, a few paces behind, as though he expected to be challenged every step of the way but intended to get as close as he could before that happened.

  And then, seeing the gate and the look of absolute rapture on Jahamat’s face, Daniel began to understand what the Mujina was promising him. He didn’t need to read the creature’s lips. It was an obvious promise given the usual dreams of a military man. Words of conquest. Promises of glory. All of that and more. To abuse the cliché, the Mujina was offering power beyond imagining, untold worlds and the kind of triumphs reserved only for the greatest generals of history.

  And the Stargate was the key to all of it.

  Thanks to the Mujina’s treachery, they had found it after all the centuries it had lay hidden in the caves beneath the ice. All sorts of scenarios played out across Daniel’s imagination in the time it took him to walk a dozen steps forward, none of them happy.

  They hadn’t recovered the DHD, Daniel realized, and from that he reasoned that the creature didn’t actually know how to use the gate, or if he did, he didn’t know the glyph for his prison planet. Which, of course, made sense. Surely it would have used the Stargate on Vasaveda to escape if it had known how? The creature had been inside their heads, sifting through their thoughts. There was nothing to say it hadn’t found the glyph for Earth there along with the one for Vasaveda. He didn’t want to think about the implications of that. The thought placed a chill in Daniel’s heart.

  He heard the soft crunch on the ice behind him.

  Daniel turned, expecting to see Sam or Teal’c. The blow took him on the side of the head, hard. Because he wasn’t expecting it, he didn’t even begin to try and fend the attack off. He saw his blood on the wrench as the man looked down at him. The world swam out of focus. He hadn’t realized he had fallen until he felt the welcoming chill of the melt on his check.

  It was too cold to be blood, he thought, as he lost consciousness.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Beautiful South

  O’Neill cursed himself for a fool as he came around.

  The world above his face lacked any kind of focus or clarity. The last thing he remembered was seeing Jahamat’s men retrieving the Stargate. After that, blank. He screwed his eyes shut again, trying to force his brain into seeing clearly but it wasn’t just his vision that was blurred. Nausea brewed in his guts. He groaned as he opened his eyes a second time. This was more than just the after effect of a blow to the head, he realized, trying to sit. He couldn’t. It wasn’t just that he lacked the strength — he had been chained down to the flat wooden bed.

  “Carter?” It sounded more like ca thur as it slurred off his swollen tongue. He’d been drugged. That explained his brain’s refusal to really wake and the languid torpor that clung like melted marshmallow to his thoughts. O’Neill twisted, but the shackles at his ankles and wrists had him effectively trussed up like a turkey. “Daniel?” Da null?

  It took him a moment to realize that the cell where they had him prisoner was moving. The occasional and sudden lurch was disconcerting.

  “Teal’c?” The ulk?

  “Yes, O’Neill?” Teal’c’s voice came back to him. It was the most welcoming sound
in the world.

  “Buddy…” buth he… It was pointless, his lips refused to obey him. It was good to know that he wasn’t alone.

  “The creature betrayed us to the Corvani, O’Neill,” Teal’c said, filling in the first of the blanks in his memory. Knowing it didn’t make him feel any better.

  “The gate?” thuh gathe?

  “They have the Stargate,” Teal’c said. There was a quality to the Jaffa’s voice that sounded so wrong in O’Neill’s ears. It took him a moment to realize what it was: defeat. He had never heard the big man sound so utterly devoid of hope. He couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened to Teal’c while he had been unconscious for the Jaffa to give up hope.

  But then, he felt the bite of iron at hand and foot and something inside him twisted; even as he pulled at the pin anchoring his right hand down he knew it was pointless. It was all pointless. The sudden swell of black that accompanied the thought wasn’t his — at least he didn’t want to believe it was. O’Neill felt the anxiety gnaw away at him, like an addict’s cravings. Part of him understood what was happening; he was coming down off ‘the hit’ of the Mujina’s nearness. It had withdrawn from his mind. He could feel the emptiness where it had been. He was alone inside his own mind, and it was the first time he could remember the feeling since they had found the creature. Almost as soon as he realized, his stomach cramped. He twisted his head violently and retched, dry heaving. The emptiness churned inside his gut and clawed up his craw.

  * * *

  Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, all of those comforting things lost all meaning in the dark of the rolling cell. O’Neill’s world was reduced to absolutes — the cravings of withdrawal, the tremors of need, and the warm fullness of the sedatives. He couldn’t remember eating, but he felt no real pangs of hunger so he assumed in the delirium of the drugs they forced some sort of nutrition down his throat.

  He remembered fragments of conversation and recalled snatches of memory, including the look on Jahamat’s face as he saw the Stargate for the first time. That wouldn’t leave him, even as the sedatives took him under. His body stank. Sweat clung to his skin feverishly. He moaned, or thought he did. He was long past being able to tell.

  They came with their needles. He even started to welcome them because they brought the blackness with them.

  He heard the others occasionally — often enough to know that they were still alive, though their words were every bit as inchoate as his thoughts.

  He dreamed Jahamat visited him. At least the meeting had all the dreamlike qualities of his imagination haunting him. The Corvani’s voice was seductive, compelling with its questions about the stars and the worlds beyond, about the Stargates and their creators, about the Asgard and the Goa’uld and all of the other human races he had encountered from Abydos to Vasaveda. And still, even when he thought he was empty of knowledge, the dream dug away into some secret hidden in the depths of memory and betrayed him that little bit more to his enemy.

  “Where are you taking us?” he asked the dream Jahamat.

  “Karelea,” the enemy said, or might have said, or might not. The word made no sense to O’Neill beyond the shape the syllables made in his mind. “I believe you, and your gateway to the stars, will be of considerable interest to Corvus Keen.”

  Keen… he’d heard that name before. He knew he had, but it slipped away from him and he slipped away from consciousness.

  When he woke again, the world had stopped moving.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Secret Garden

  They traded one prison for another.

  The haze of the sedatives gradually cleared, but Teal’c felt no better for it. The Jaffa tested his bonds. There was no give in the iron. He felt naked without his staff weapon. For much of the journey south to the capitol, Karelea, they had pumped drugs into his body to subdue him. They were ineffective. His symbiote processed much of the toxins rendering the sedatives harmless. Teal’c did not allow his captors to realize he was effectively immune. Instead, he feigned grogginess when they came in to the rolling prison and watched as they sedated the others, and listened to the one called Jahamat as he ingratiated himself into O’Neill’s drug-addled subconscious with his questions. It was well done. The man might have used more direct methods, cracking O’Neill’s psyche open like the shell of a nut, but instead he teased the information out one secret at a time.

  It took time, but so did the journey south.

  The gradually increasing warmth through the cell’s thin walls was the only proof that they were actually moving away from the arctic north to more bearable climes.

  It was not only the Corvani that learned secrets through deception. Jahamat and the Mujina were careless with their tongues, confident that none of their prisoners were lucid enough to understand even if they heard. Teal’c listened, content in his silence, as the Mujina filled Jahamat’s head with all the secrets of the Stargates and the lies of possibility. More than once he wondered if the creature was aware he faked unconsciousness. If it was, it gave no indication of it. In return for the Mujina’s promises, the Corvani shared all that he knew of his own society and his hopes that the Stargate would once and for all prove that his people were indeed above the cursed Kelani in terms of their evolution.

  How could that be argued, now that he could prove they had come to Kumara from the stars? It couldn’t, surely? And once they opened the gate for Keen, every belief he held would be vindicated. It would be the dawning of a new age, and Jahamat would stand right at the very heart of it, the most important man in the world for a few minutes at least.

  Keen would reward him.

  Teal’c hid his skepticism behind a veneer of sleep. He had served enough men to know that the messenger was never truly important, no matter how much he might crave the acclaim. Keen would accept Jahamat’s proof and then he would send the man off on another fool’s mission. That was the nature of men like Corvus Keen; they were never content, and they never kept anyone capable of posing a threat close enough to hurt them. If they opened the gate, Teal’c knew, Jahamat would be among the first to go off world, and none of those he left behind would shed any tears if he did not return.

  Listening in the dark, Teal’c came to understand the creature more and more as it goaded the man on. It was obvious it viewed Jahamat as a means to an end, not the end itself. It wanted to be taken to the capitol, Karelea, for one reason and one reason alone — because that was where the greatest concentration of people lay, and it needed to be in the center, at the heart of everything if it was going to replace Keen. It needed people to feed it and feed off it, much as Teal’c needed his symbiote and his symbiote needed him. So for a while they served a commonality of purpose, but as soon as that mutual need was sated, the creature would move on to another who would better serve it, and then another and another, until it was as close to Corvus Keen as it could come, and then, perhaps, it would even replace the man himself. Would the creature make a beneficent ruler? Would it present itself as a pontiff, a holy figure to be worshipped? Or would it stand before the people as a warrior worthy of mens’ bended knee?

  The answer was that it would be all these things, of course.

  When the talk wasn’t about the stars it was about much more earthly concerns: the weapons that had been confiscated from the visitors. Jahamat had never seen such controlled killing power. Teal’c lay on his pallet listening to the staccato rattle of gunfire as the Corvani tried out a gun. He had no way of knowing whether the man aimed at a live target, not for sure, but occasionally the quality of sound changed. That was when his rounds found their mark. There were no accompanying screams but that didn’t mean anything.

  Jahamat seemed happy when he came into the rolling cell that night.

  “Almost there,” he told O’Neill. The colonel was too far gone to appreciate what that meant. Teal’c was not. They neared journey’s end. Soon they would have two choices, escape or execution. That was what it always came down to with men
of power. There was no moral ambiguity; their world was one of absolutes, the known and the unknown. The known was conquered, tamed, the unknown neutralized so that it could not pose a threat. Teal’c had come to understand that much about humanity — it was governed by an overbearing fear of the unknown. As a result it was kill first, study, analyze and ask questions later. With the weapons it would be easy enough to back-engineer similar mechanisms, updating their hopelessly archaic low-caliber bolt-action rifles with genuine weapons of war.

  With the men it was always going to be different once the information they needed had been prized out of their heads.

  Teal’c was a man of war. He had no desire to lie to himself. For now they were being kept alive — it was a practicality, they had secrets still to be unlocked, things that Jahamat believed he could barter for greater influence with Keen. When they reached their destination everything would change. They would be handed over to Corvus Keen himself. For a while they would be a curiosity, and like Jahamat, Keen would bleed them, but only for so long because he would instinctively suspect treachery. Men like him always did. After that they would pass some invisible threshold where they would once again become a threat and their hours would be numbered. Teal’c had lived his life fighting every day for as long as he could remember, and not once in that time had he encountered an enemy foolish enough to leave the proverbial teeth in the snake so that it might bite him. Men of Corvus Keen’s ilk, tyrants, did not survive by being foolish. Power was amassed with an almost predatory cunning. When they had outlived their usefulness they would be dealt with. It would be clean and efficient. Practical.

  “Tell me all about this wonderful weapon of yours,” Jahamat crooned, so close to Teal’c’s ear the Jaffa felt his foul breath prickle his skin. He suppressed the shiver of distaste even as it started. “I have seen the future of death… I have held it in my hands… and it is glorious.” The lust in the man’s voice was barely restrained. He leaned in closer still so that his lips brushed against Teal’c’s ear. “Is this a promise of what awaits through the Stargate? Have all these worlds refined death to such an art?” The man grunted. “I know you are not asleep, Teal’c. I have been watching you. It is truly remarkable how little the drugs affect you. I suspect it is a secret of your physiognomy. You are not like the others are you? Like a woman you carry a second life within you. Oh yes, the Mujina has told me all of your secrets. I will hear them from your own lips sooner or later. I hope later. I should like to hear you beg and plead first, Jaffa. Oh yes, I know what you are. Now tell me about this weapon of yours before we reach the city. I can hide you from Keen’s men,” Jahamat promised. “I can protect you. Or I can turn you over to his freak, Iblis, and let him carry out one of his vile experiments on you. It is up to you, Teal’c. What’s it going to be?”