02 - The Price You Pay

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  On the upside, they were also going to be sent directly to the building that housed the Saqqara Stargate.

  All in all, it would probably save them considerable sneaking-around time—if they could stay alive that long.

  Across the room, similar thoughts were running through Daniel Jackson’s mind, with one essential difference. He didn’t think of it as being sent into the proximity of the Gate.

  He thought of it as getting much, much closer to the potential presence of Sha’re.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  O’Neill’s eyes met Mafret’s across the room. He wasn’t quite sure whether he was asking for help, or what kind of help the diminutive housekeeper could offer, or what opportunity there might be.

  She caught his look and lifted her chin, a red flush spreading over her cheekbones, and then she swallowed abruptly and signaled to one of the men nearby.

  He stepped forward in turn and crouching, touched Ahmose on the shoulder. Ahmose scuttled backward before getting to his feet. Nekhmet, sublimely confident that his merest wish would be followed, had already turned away.

  Ahmose had a rapid exchange of words with the man, and then Mafret came up and added something. Ahmose nodded. The servant stepped forward, clearing his throat.

  “All those who are of the tribute of M’kwethet shall present themselves, as has been ordered by the Lord Nekhmet. Those who serve in the kitchen of the Great House, in the yards of the Great House, and in the inner chambers thereof shall also prepare and present themselves for their daily tasks, and be quick in service to the Great One!”

  That brought a few yelps of dismay, as the non-tribute slaves were caught off guard by their summons. There was considerable confusion and milling around as some dashed out to warn their coworkers, others tried to find their respective cohorts, and the bewildered newcomers milled around looking for guidance.

  Mafret moved among them, providing that guidance, tugging sleeves, pointing, directing.

  By the time she was finished, everyone was thoroughly confused. It was obvious to O’Neill and Jackson that the groups were mixed beyond separation, looking at each other uncertainly.

  The group O’Neill and Jackson found themselves in were obviously unfamiliar with each other. The looks received by the two men from Earth, dressed identically as they were to every other occupant of the servant house, were no less blank than the looks all the rest of them received. O’Neill’s guess about the collars seemed to be correct; everyone else in their group wore them too.

  The whole horde of them finally moved out, following in the sandaled footsteps of the oblivious Goa’uld strutting before them.

  Unlike the time of their arrival, the Great Hall now was more like Grand Central Station, a scene of controlled chaos as hundreds of people streamed from one end of the room to the other, disappearing through large doorways. The Gate seemed to open to let newcomers in or to allow Goa’uld and Serpent Guards out on a fairly regular basis. O’Neill let go an involuntary sigh of relief. While the various work teams milled around, re-sorting themselves, and the tribute group wobbled like a disconnected compass, he and Jackson slipped away as if to join a bucket brigade, then ducked down a temporarily empty hallway.

  It wasn’t empty for more than a couple of seconds. Apparently their refuge led to a ready room for the Serpent Guards. Weapons lined the wall. Tables with chairs shoved carelessly into place occupied the center of the room.

  And two Serpent Guards followed them, their helmets down, conversing quietly. They didn’t seem particularly surprised at the sight of human slaves in their demesne.

  O’Neill casually worked his way around behind them, checked to make sure no one else was coming down the hallway, and leaped, tigerlike.

  The first Jaffa went sprawling, while the second’s neck cracked with a brittle sound under O’Neill’s hands. The man fell limp as a rag doll as O’Neill tossed him aside and executed a carefully calculated kick to the second man’s throat just as he tried to push himself up and call an alarm. It was all over in less than ten seconds.

  “Okay, Daniel,” O’Neill said, as soon as he could catch his breath. He handed the other man one of the helmets. “We’re not going to get any better chance than this. We’ve got to go find Nekhmet.” The two of them stripped off their slave collars and replaced them, awkwardly, with Serpent Guard helmets and leather kilts, shoving the bodies into a weapons chest and placing the weapons it originally held on top. “We’ll have a better chance if we split up. Then we can meet back here.”

  Daniel nodded, looking around rapidly, compulsively. Sha’re was here. She had to be. She was—

  Suddenly long, strong fingers were biting deep into his shoulders. “Dammit, Daniel. Look at me!”

  Shocked, he had no choice. O’Neill’s brown eyes were blazing into his.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the colonel said, his words quick and low. “Dammit, I thought the same thing. It’s a chance to find Sha’re, to find Skaara. It’s a good bet they’re here, somewhere.

  “And we’re not gonna do that.

  “I’ve got two people depending on me—on us—to get them home from M’kwethet. Sam Carter and Teal’C are waiting for us. This is the only way back we’ve got, and we’re gonna do it quick and quiet and keep our heads down.”

  Jackson swallowed hard and nodded, acknowledging both the thought and the order that countermanded it.

  From that very hallway, they could hear the Gate belching open once again, the billowing of strange plasma settling back into itself.

  “Synchronize your watch—no, wait, never mind.” O’Neill looked disgusted with himself.

  “If we’re going to split up, don’t we need to agree on a time when we’ll meet?”

  “Yeah, sure.” O’Neill paused, and Jackson could see him thinking. “We don’t have to worry about elapsed time through the wormhole. It doesn’t seem to matter how far apart the worlds are, it always takes the same amount of time. Really funky physics.” At Jackson’s look of surprise, O’Neill shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time looking at the pretty lights in the sky. Figured I might as well learn some astrophysics along the way. Don’t tell Carter.”

  “It’s Greek to me,” Jackson assured him with a straight face, trying to shake the flash of resentment—and maybe even a bit of fear—he’d felt when O’Neill grabbed him.

  “Oh, baaaaaaaaaad joke, Daniel.” O’Neill stepped away, peered around the pillars. “Look. The main thing is to get all four of us back home, and that means retrieving Carter and Teal’C. That means we have to get our hands on a Key. Nekhmet isn’t going to loan it to us just for the asking.”

  Daniel nodded, swallowing hard.

  “We’re going to have to kill him, and it’s not going to be like killing those Jaffa, Daniel. It’s going to be coldblooded murder.”

  Jackson could feel his eyes widening.

  He gave Daniel one last, searching look. Don’t go looking for Sha’re. He fretted momentarily, then let it go. “You do what you need to do, okay? Whichever of us gets through to bring them back—back to the guardroom, okay? We’ll rendezvous there if we have to. Look, whichever of us gets through, we’ll try to get back every three hours. The one still here has to have some idea when to be around. Every three hours, and we all go back home together. Right?”

  Daniel swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Okay, then.”

  O’Neill went marching out into the hall as if he belonged there, with Daniel scrambling to catch up. The Gate guard nodded to the two of them, and O’Neill nodded back, raising a hand in salute without stopping, as they had seen the Guards do when they had first arrived. As they crossed the hall and the frescoes on the walls loomed larger, O’Neill muttered, “You go right, I’ll go left. Good luck.”

  “How will I know whether you’ve already gone back to M’kwethet?” Daniel asked belatedly.

  The helmet swung around toward him, expressionless and evil. “You’ll know.”

&nb
sp; With that, O’Neill walked away, disappearing down the long hall to the left.

  Taking a deep breath, Daniel veered to the right, in search of Nekhmet. Among other things.

  He owed it to himself, to the Project, to gather as much data as possible while he was here, he told himself. He was an archaeologist. He had training in anthropology and folklore—that was one of the reasons he was a member of SG-1, after all. Who knew when such a golden opportunity would present itself again? Even if Saqqara wasn’t the Goa’uld homeworld, it was obviously a major center for the aliens. He couldn’t throw away the chance.

  If he concentrated very, very hard on that thought, he could ignore the memory of O’Neill’s blazing eyes as the colonel told him not to do exactly what he was going to do anyway. What he “had to do.”

  Find Sha’re.

  At least see her.

  * * *

  O’Neill flowed forward, paying little attention to the wonders around him. He was looking for Nekhmet, and failing that, for any Jaffa who wore a Key. He didn’t really think Daniel was going to be able to find one, or if he did, that the archaeologist would be able to get the apparatus; in fact, he was more or less certain that at this very moment Daniel was more likely thinking about his lost wife than anything else. It wasn’t that Daniel didn’t care deeply about the team, but he cared most about Sha’re. O’Neill didn’t really blame him. It was no accident that O’Neill had chosen to follow the corridor that Nekhmet had used the last time they’d seen him; he just hoped he wouldn’t have to rescue the archaeologist too, once he got the others back.

  And he would get the others back.

  He spent just long enough in each room to determine that it was empty and then swept on, merciless as a hunting hawk.

  Daniel was halfway across the Great Hall, going south, when he caught sight of the helmeted Serpent Guard heading for the guardroom. He had slipped his own stolen helmet off and left it tucked under the curtain, unable to tolerate the weight and the feel of the thing. Now he changed direction slightly to pass a little farther away from the Jaffa. He couldn’t run; he could only hope that the Jaffa would simply not-see yet another human slave.

  He’d managed to put a couple of columns between himself and the alcove by the time the Jaffa reached the control panel. He couldn’t resist stopping to glance back. This was obviously the new panel operator. He spent a good two or three minutes looking around for the man he replaced, but apparently never looked behind the curtain. The Gate opened then, disrupting his search, and immediately thereafter another party of Jaffa showed up for transport. By that time the panel operator apparently decided that doing his job was more important than looking for his predecessor. Daniel sagged against the column, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Opening his eyes again, he continued in the direction the arriving parties of Goa’uld had taken. He kept close to the walls, never meeting anyone’s eyes, acutely aware of the puzzled glances occasionally cast his way. It was the damned glasses, it had to be. Jaffa, whose larval Goa’uld implants kept them superbly healthy, had no use for vision correction, and the technology didn’t seem common to the human slaves.

  The alternative was moving through a large blur, so he kept the glasses on. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

  He passed a number of branching hallways and doorways before finally admitting that he had no idea where he was going. He needed a place to hide, first of all. Nekhmet had probably discovered that his case studies in the “aged and halt” category had gone missing, and instituted a search—a search that could well uncover the dead Jaffa. But he didn’t have to hide for long, he decided. After all, when they’d come through the Gate with the tribute, he hadn’t seen anyone at the control panel, so as O’Neill had pointed out, obviously it wasn’t staffed all the time. He’d wait until the operator was gone, then open the Gate again, and hope that O’Neill and the others were ready.

  Having resigned himself, he turned the corner of the next high arched doorway he came to, seeking shelter.

  What he saw next stopped him dead in his tracks. The only thing he could think of was the words all students of Egyptology read at the very beginning of their studies, read with yearning and awe and profound envy of the man who had made, in 1922, the definitive discovery in their field:

  As he peered through the small hole, Carter was at first unable to distinguish specific objects, because the pale light cast off by the candle flickered constantly. But he soon realised that he was looking, not at wall paintings, but at three-dimensional objects: they appeared to be enormous gold bars stacked against the wall opposite the entrance. Dumbfounded, transfixed, he just stood there muttering: “wonderful, marvellous, my God, wonderful!”

  But instead of looking at the jumbled relics of a dead boy-king, he found himself, like a mouse at a banquet, looking up at the very image of the Son of the Living Sun, Beloved of Aten, the Mighty Bull Enthroned in Splendor, Living Forever: Apophis. In a portrait at least forty feet tall.

  So that’s what they use all those feathers for, the voice in the back of his mind observed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  If it weren’t for the immediate issue of the survival of the team, O’Neill thought, this would be a terrific opportunity to spy. He’d have to put that in his report to Hammond when it was all over. If they could get their hands on a portable DHD—when, he corrected himself—they’d never have to worry again about getting trapped this way, or finding themselves on worlds where the DHD might be damaged beyond repair. It would be a terrific addition to Earth’s arsenal.

  And who knew what else was here? The mind control devices of the Goa’uld, like the ribbon devices they wore around their hands that produced devastating energies, were most likely forever beyond their reach. But the Jaffa had started out human, and they couldn’t use them either, so there had to be a lot of stuff, energy weapons like Teal’C’s staff and so on, that Earth could use. And adapt. And improve. Human beings had always been really good at finding newer and better ways to kill.

  The trouble was, most of the time he had no idea what he was looking at and couldn’t take time to window-shop. One room was full of heavy, metal, pointy things that had to be weapons of some sort, but he had no idea how they worked. Once he found himself looking out a back door into a garden as exquisite and extensive under a glorious blue sky as anything produced at Versailles, but he couldn’t see anyone out admiring it and there wasn’t any cover among the graded walkways and cheerful fountains anyway. He ducked back in and kept going.

  Even Goa’uld had to have a support infrastructure. Kitchens, to produce food for masters and slaves. Laundries—at least he supposed they were laundries, judging from the clothing hanging in rack upon rack, though there wasn’t any humidity or smell of steam. Or perhaps there was and he just couldn’t smell it through the heavy Serpent Guard helmet. Once he was fairly sure no one was around, he retracted the serpent head, breathing a sigh of claustrophobic relief as it slid back and collapsed into a collar around his neck. Anyone seeing him now would know instantly he wasn’t the real thing—no mark upon his forehead—but at least he could look around without turning his head.

  But this wasn’t going to get him anywhere. This random wandering was taking hours; he was getting hungry and thirsty and frustrated. Nekhmet could be anywhere, but O’Neill was willing to bet he wouldn’t be hanging around the laundry room. He was going to have to take the direct approach, which appealed to him anyway.

  Heading away from the laundries, he moved back in the direction of the kitchens. If he hadn’t seen Mafret’s, he wouldn’t have recognized these as food preparation areas either; they consisted of a series of rooms with large white cabinets along the walls and large granite-looking tables scattered about. By this time several slaves were beginning to busy themselves, pulling covered dishes out of the cabinets and placing them on trays.

  O’Neill hesitated, then took a deep breath, removed the Serpent Guard helmet, and dropped the energy staff behind
it. After a moment’s thought he also got rid of the gray metal collar around his neck.

  Adopting his very best imitation of servile fear, he approached one of the men who seemed to be directing matters.

  “My lord,” he whined, “I beg you to help me. I am ordered to take food to my lord Nekhmet, and I don’t know where he is.”

  The servant, an older, gray-haired man, stifled a laugh as he looked up at O’Neill. “You don’t know where he is? Are you joking?”

  O’Neill stared down at his feet. “No, lord. I’m new, just come from M’kwethet. Please, lord, I’m afraid they’ll punish me.” He tried to imagine himself as Oliver Twist. Please, sir, may I have some more? It didn’t help. However, Look, buddy, I asked you a question probably would help even less.

  “If you don’t want to be punished, you’ll wipe that look off your face. The lords don’t want to see their servants sucking lemons.” The kitchen master looked around the room, which was beginning to fill with activity as more and more people poured in, preparing food, embellishing food, bearing it away to some unknown destination. “I suppose this means my lord isn’t eating with the others of the high Jaffa. He didn’t happen to say what he wanted, did he?”

  O’Neill swallowed hard and shook his head. “Bread?” he tried to suggest helpfully.

  “You idiot.” But the overseer said it in an absentminded, almost kindly fashion, far more interested in watching the minor commotion at the other end of the room caused by humans carrying, of all things, a helmet and an energy staff. “Where did they get those things? Here, you! Get rid of that now. Are you trying to get killed? As for you—” he wheeled back to O’Neill, “take those cakes there. My lord’s chamber is at the end of the Hall of Serpents, in the northwest wing. Go at once. You’ll find he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”