by Jamie Duncan
The woman raised a hand and laid two fingers on the scar. “My brother,” she said, and her eyes were pale like the water in the bowl, dully reflecting the thin light but alert.
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Your brother did that?”
She nodded. “Sebek’s Jaffa, they are often hungry.” Her hand fell and a grim sort of smile tugged at her lips, made the puckering of the scar more noticeable. “They like pretty things.”
Sam looked away. “Right.”
She’d heard this story before, on planets scattered so far from each other they weren’t even pinpricks of light in the sky. Goa’uld appetite was another galactic constant. She found herself picturing Daniel, wondering if that kind of hunger—
Her gut twisted sharply and she had to physically scour the thought from her brain with a scrubbing fist at her temple. When she opened her eyes, the woman was watching her closely, knowingly, and Sam felt an unreasonable flare of anger at the thought of this stranger thinking about Daniel like that. But the knowing look softened a fraction to something a little like sympathy, making the scar twitch on the woman’s cheek, and Sam’s anger faded. She was too tired for that kind of anger. There were more practical things to be angry about.
Focus.
The room was crowded now. While she had been tending to Teal’c, several others had arrived like gloom coalescing in the corners. Now they were hovering silently against the walls. Like the woman, they were thin angles of hunger, sketchy suggestions of people. The one nearest Sam had his feet wrapped in fags and tied round with twine, but the rest were barefoot, and even in her boots, Sam’s own toes were a little numbed by cold. The men shuffled constantly in the shadows, taking turns near the tin-can stove and the warm brick hearth. While she worked, she’d kept track from the corner of her eye and now she placed the room’s occupants on the mental map in her head: nine in the narrow, low-ceilinged room, plus the woman, who was still watching her attentively. There were three men between Sam and the doorway. She had one hand on the zat beside her, for all the good that would do against these people, except that, really, they didn’t look like they’d put up much resistance, even if she’d gone for them hand-to-hand. But Teal’c was heavy, and there was no way she’d be able to heave him out of here unless he were conscious and helping. She scanned the men in the room and wondered which one was the brother with the knife.
“What’s your name?” she asked the woman.
“Brenneka.” With a nod toward Aadi, who was still crouched at Teal’c’s head, hands tucked up inside his shirt and eyes rodent bright, she smiled again. “That one calls me Bren, though I tell him I will wear his skin for shoes.”
Aadi’s grin was wide and he bounced a little as he nodded his head. “Have to catch me first,” he answered in a sort of toneless sing-song that said this was a game they’d played many times before.
“Not so easy these days,” Brenneka admitted with faintly amused disappointment. “He’s mostly legs and big feet, like his father, my brother.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Aris Boch is your brother?” Involuntarily, her hand came up and she pointed a finger at Brenneka’s scarred face.
“Yes, but not that one. Sebek killed that brother three days ago, at the vault.” Her face was hard, smeared with grit and shadow.
“Oh.” A small part of Sam relaxed, and she felt a little less nervous about the men at her back. “I’m sorry.”
With a shrug that said that sympathy was useless, Brenneka looked at Teal’c, tilting her head pensively for a moment and then reaching out to trace the edge of his tattoo with a tentative finger. Sam’s hand tightened around the zat while she wished again for her Beretta.
“Are you sure about him?” Brenneka asked.
“Of course.”
She turned back to Sam, a frown notched between her brows.
“The Jaffa are followers, like insects, each one with its job, its place. Drones.”
“That’s not true of Teal’c.”
Brenneka didn’t look convinced.
Sam leaned in to lay a hand on Teal’c’s forehead, displacing Brenneka’s. His skin was hot. “Teal’c has raised armies to fight the Goa’uld and free the Jaffa from enslavement.” She decided she’d give a lot for aspirin right then. The last thing he needed was a fever. “You know, maybe you have more in common with them than you think.”
A hiss of dissent ran through the room, half-suppressed curses escaping between teeth. Only Brenneka voiced hers aloud and punctuated it by spitting onto the bricks around the little stove. “In common.” The scar twitched as she curled her lip derisively. “We’re the broken bones. The Jaffa break us.”
“And the Goa’uld break them,” Sam said.
“Good.” Brenneka struggled to her feet, then shoved her way through the small crowd and out into the thin, grey light. The men murmured their agreement and one by one drifted away like dispersing fog. In the corner, the coals in the tin-can stove glowed dully and cast no shadows.
Sam zipped her jacket up to her neck and crawled closer to Teal’c, settling herself against the wall beside his shoulder, the zat on her lap. She could always use it as a club, she figured. And it would work on Jaffa, still. On the other side of Teal’c, Aadi squatted with his legs and arms pulled inside his long shirt and watched her with pale, dimly curious eyes.
“What did she mean, when she said your dad thought we’d be worth something?” she demanded.
He pulled a hand out from inside his sleeve and chewed his thumb for a moment. “Maybe trade you,” he answered finally. “Maybe use you.”
“Use us for what?”
He shrugged that shrug again, and Sam had to count in multiples of seven until the urge to zat him went away. Insolence, she thought wryly, as she leaned forward and pulled Teal’c’s jacket closed and zipped it up. He murmured something and her hands hovered unmoving over him while she waited for more, but he settled again into stillness. The wash of sunlight across his face faded slowly and brightened again as clouds shuffled and parted for a moment. Then the light went out for good, and a sudden rain drummed heavily on the tin roof of the shelter. She could hear feet splashing in the mud outside, a few distant shouts, and one closer before a tarp was pulled down across the latticework. It blocked out the rain and left them in a shifting, watery darkness warmed by the glow of the coals and the dim square of daylight that shone through the plastic sheeting that served as a door.
Aadi shuffled around like a dog turning in his bed and hunched deeper into himself, dropping his head onto his folded arms on his knees. Sam let her head fall back against the crumbling brick of the wall and tried to get her bearings. It wasn’t easy; the rain seemed to hollow out her head and leave nothing but throbbing behind. Raising a hand to her temple, she winced at the tenderness there and followed it along her cheekbone and around her eye. Probably a hell of a shiner, she figured, and maybe, since they were so lucky, a bit of a concussion. She didn’t even bother trying to inventory the bruises she’d earned falling down a flight of stairs tangled with an armored Jaffa.
“Focus, focus,” she told herself and forced her eyes open to stare at the ruddy mouth of the stove. They weren’t all that far from the bunker they’d escaped, right on the edge of the ha’tak’s late-morning shadow. Her eyes strayed to the faint outline of the lattice window. She wondered which way the sun was moving, and pictured that shadow sliding like the blade of a sundial across the valley floor, marking time.
Beside her, Teal’c’s hands twitched fitfully and he mumbled something she couldn’t quite hear. Patting his shoulder, she said, “shh shh,” and continued pacing out the city in her head. This little hovel was, in fact, pretty swank compared to most in the neighborhood, what with two actual brick walls and a door covering and all. It sat at the centre of the shanty town sprawled on the edge of the black river. The ha’tak stood between them and the entrance to the mine. She’d glimpsed the glowing geometry of its gold apex between the leaning remains of towers and the slumped an
d tumbled ruins of what had once been pretty impressive buildings.
But she’d had to keep her eyes on her feet for the most part to keep from tripping on the heaved and uneven surface of the alleys and dropping Teal’c—again. The third time, two of Brenneka’s men had finally done more than get her and Teal’c on their feet, the larger of them taking some of Teal’c’s weight and helping her guide him down the narrow passageways deeper and deeper into the ramshackle settlement. That last time, they’d fallen onto a broken face, a blue mosaic eye as wide as she was tall staring up past them at the grey sky. Pulling herself to her knees and then to her feet to sling Teal’c’s arm over her shoulder again, she’d noticed that none of the six people with them had stepped on that eye, each of them skirting it carefully. Behind her Aadi and Brenneka had whispered in unison as they passed, but she hadn’t been able to make out the words.
It had taken forever to cover what couldn’t have been more than a kilometer, and Teal’c had gotten heavier and heavier until, by the time Brenneka had pulled back the sheeting and ushered them into the shelter, Sam and her helper had had to drag him, his boot-heels bumping over a mosaic sea, curling waves made of tiny squares of glass embedded in the floor. Now, she absently picked at the grout between the squares and wondered what the Colonel was up to, how long Teal’c would be out, whether or not they should eat the remaining power bar or save it for trade, and finally, whether she and Teal’c were grateful guests or prisoners. Mostly, she tried not to fall asleep, because two stoves floated in the gloom in front of her eyes sometimes and sometimes just one, and her head was pounding so hard that the sound of the rain seemed to rise and fall, now nearer, now farther away, like she was swaying… swaying.
“Eat,” Brenneka said.
Sam’s head snapped forward as she woke, making the floor rock and twist as if it really were an ocean. She flattened her hands on the mosaic either side of her, and sucked in a few deep breaths while she waited for the world to settle again. Brenneka was holding out a bowl and thrust it forward against Sam’s knees.
“Eat something. You look terrible.”
Sam couldn’t stifle a laugh, and when she tried to duck her head, pain shot up her neck and made her wince. Rain was still rattling on the roof, so she couldn’t tell if the sound Brenneka made was an answering laugh or not.
She accepted the bowl, tipped it to look at the thin, whitish slush at the bottom. “What is it?” she asked, trying not to grimace. It didn’t smell like anything at all.
“Nutrient paste.” Brenneka sat down and leaned back on her hands. “It doesn’t fill you up, but it makes the machine bum well enough.” She pointed at the window, then leaned back again. “They shovel it out for us every two or three days in the square. And on special days, if we are quick, like Aadi there, and if we can get into small spaces, there’s squig.”
Sam stopped with her cupped hand halfway to her mouth. “Squig?”
Aadi stirred and held his curved fingers up to his mouth to imitate fangs. “Little hairy things with thin tails and tiny eyes. Live down in the dark places.”
“Rats,” Sam said. Another galactic constant.
“The eyes are the best,” Aadi added with a wistful lilt to his voice. “I always get the eyes if I catch them.”
Sam licked the paste off of her fingers and tried not to think about rat-eye delicacies. The paste didn’t taste like anything either, which she decided to take as a blessing—although the bowl was empty too soon. She eyed the second one next to Brenneka’s hand.
“For the Jaffa,” Brenneka said. “If he wakes up.”
“When,” Sam corrected.
Brenneka’s shrug was identical to Aadi’s, part indifference, real or feigned, part caginess. “The worm should have healed him by now.”
Putting down the empty bowl, Sam laid a hand on Teal’c’s forehead. His skin was hot, but the tattoo was cool under her fingers. She wondered if he could always feel the shape, the weight of gold stamped into him.
“What is it?” Brenneka asked, and Sam looked up to see her pointing at the tattoo. “I’ve not seen this one.”
“It’s the mark of Apophis.”
“But what is it?”
Sam tilted her head and peered at the gleaming image, more silvery than gold in the rainy light, ran her fingers gently over it, realizing that she’d never asked Teal’c to explain it. It hadn’t seemed right to talk about it. Daniel would know, though, and she wondered why she’d never asked him. She would, first thing when he was back. With a tentative finger, she traced the arcs and curves, and she sighed. “It’s a serpent at the center of the world,” she speculated, her fingers moving along the lower half of the oval, “Earth,” the inner cupped line, “sea,” and the top half of the oval, “sky.” Part of her wished that Teal’c would wake up and be affronted at this intrusion.
“Arrogance,” Brenneka observed.
Sam caught herself shrugging. “I guess after a few thousand years they start believing their own advertising.”
Brenneka’s expression of hatred was eloquent. “A worm that declares itself a god is still a worm.” She picked up Sam’s bowl and inspected it for scraps, running a finger around the inside, then licking the residue off of it. “We remember the gods. Sebek isn’t one of them.”
Sam thought of the giant mosaic eye staring blankly at the sky. Was that the god or was it the people looking for one? She stretched out one leg and then the other, wincing at the stiffness in her knees. It sure didn’t seem like there was anybody looking back at this place. Walking through the Stargate for seven years had taught Sam what godforsaken looked like. The rain seemed to drum directly on her skull and, as she slumped back against the wall sodden with weariness, it seemed like the whole galaxy was filled with broken people, broken, angry and indifferent gods. Good riddance to most of the latter. But still, the eye stared up at the sky, waiting for something. The edges of the tiles on the floor bit into her palms as she tried to find a comfortable position against the uneven bricks. Teal’c mumbled again, his hands clenching and releasing.
Brenneka was right: the symbiote would have been well on the way to healing him by now. Giving up on the idea of getting comfortable, Sam said, “We -1 have to get back into the bunker.” � Brenneka laughed, a short, disbelieving bark.
“I’m serious. If I don’t get to our gear, Teal’c will die.” Remembering Teal’c’s warning look when she’d been about to mention his need for tretonin to Aadi, she hesitated. No show of weakness. She glanced down at Teal’c’s paling face. Too late for that. “Not just from the wound, either. He needs a special medicine.”
Brenneka looked skeptical. “The worm—”
“There is no worm. He lost it.”
“He’s Jaffa.”
Sam could see her struggling to put what seemed like mutually exclusive facts together. Sam shook her head impatiently. “Yes, but he’s different. The Goa’uld destroyed the Jaffa’s immune systems when they engineered them as hosts, but we’ve been able to synthesize a drug that releases the Jaffa from their dependency on the symbiote. Without that drug, they die.”
Brenneka considered this for a moment. “Seems to me that you’ve given them a new kind of slavery. Maybe he’s better without it.”
“He’ll die.”
“You say he fights for freedom. Well, freedom has its price.”
Sam yanked on the thong around Brenneka’s neck and pulled the small vial at the end of it out into the dim light. The roshna inside was a pale blue glow. “For you, too?”
Brenneka snatched the vial back, stood, and walked out of the hut. If there had been a door, she’d have slammed it.
Although they weren’t prisoners in any meaningful sense of the word, no visiting Tok’ra was ever allowed to leave the base without escort, and they were always under the watchful eye of security forces while at the mountain—even Jacob, whose security clearance had been the highest possible before he left the Air Force. But now the military considered him alien, apar
t from them, inseparable from his symbiote. It was hard for Jacob to remember a time when this hadn’t been status quo for him, this combination of trust and mistrust, friendship and suspicion, with which even old friends now greeted him. Even George had his moments of doubt, and Jacob couldn’t blame him. If someone had told him ten years ago he’d finish his days living on other planets with a snake sharing his body, he would have had them locked up in a padded cell. Tough to wrap his head around, even now.
Snake? Selmak’s thoughts slid into his consciousness, like slender golden threads. You have learned this term from O’Neill. It is a most derogatory way of thinking of your brethren.
I know. Jacob didn’t have to apologize. Selmak was already aware of his feelings on the matter. Not like he was able to hide them.
Malek means well, but he pursues an agenda separate from that which benefits our Tauri friends. Selmak was watching Malek, seeing him through Jacob’s eyes. He prowled around his quarters like a trapped cat. Jacob was familiar with that restless anxious feeling. It never went away when he was underground. He’d grown accustomed to living in the tunnels, but he’d never managed to overcome that feeling of being locked away inside the earth, buried. Trapped. Like a vampire, hiding in the dark.
Vampires? Selmak was deeply amused. Your analogy leaves much to be desired.
Not literally. Well… maybe a little bit. But it’s only an expression. Sharing nearly every thought and feeling with Selmak had become easier over the years, but once in a while, Jacob felt a pang of regret for his lost privacy. Selmak always understood and withdrew at those times, but he was always at the back of Jacob’s consciousness, a sentient hum underlying all of his other senses.