by Jamie Duncan
“You mean a woman with mirrors for eyes and glass scales like a mermaid?” Daniel asked, still turned toward the apparition in the passageway.
“Yeah.”
“Nope.”
“Very funny, Daniel.” Jack rubbed his eye with his fist and used Daniel’s pant leg to drag himself to his feet. “This must be what going crazy feels like.”
Daniel nodded absently, saying, “Yeah, something like this,” as he started off down the hall toward her.
Jack hooked him by the collar of his shirt. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To follow the glass lady?” Daniel pried Jack’s fingers away. “Who is leaving, by the way.”
And she was. Jack could see the shimmer of her skin as she turned and followed the curve of the wall into the shadows. The light fluttered inside the walls, coursing after her, chasing darkness. Jack couldn’t be sure, but there was a faint sharpening inside his head, like his alertness was being honed from dullness, and something that seemed like singing, a high, clear, wordless song. The sound was like a ribbon woven between his ribs, tugging at him.
Aris gave Jack a shove. “You heard the man. Follow the nice glass lady.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sam trailed her fingers along the smooth surface of the alley wall and wondered what Daniel would make of it. Some kind of glazed clay, she thought, but how had they made it in such long, unbroken segments? Under her boots, the ubiquitous mosaic stuttered around potholes and disappeared like interrupted sentences under new walls and the fallen pieces of old ones. There was probably a story there in the pictures, and another, sadder one in the way it had been broken and remade by the makeshift city. Daniel would know how to read both. She’d seen him reconstruct a whole village from the faint lines of buried foundations and the distribution of charred animal bones and broken pots, and his hands had moved through the air as he described the way families had gathered around this tumble of flat stones that was a hearth, had carried water from that spring, had knelt here to scrape the fur from some fantastic animal with a bone tool familiar on two dozen planets and across millennia. With its past and present layered together like graffiti on a Da Vinci, this city would be a treasure for him, echoing with voices.
To her, the city was silent, full of crouching shadows and blank spaces that she couldn’t help but mentally fill with waiting Jaffa. But Hamel moved swiftly and confidently from alley to alley, pausing occasionally to peer around a corner before darting out and waving at them to follow. His lantern bounced and swayed, and the city leaped into existence and faded to inference as they passed. It didn’t take long, though, for Sam understand where they were headed, once she’d figured out that they were coming at it from a different angle, Hamel’s own shortcut. The Ancient tower was like a compass with the whole city laid out around it in her mind.
Even with the darkness and the cold rain, though, this trip seemed to take less time than the first one, and they were crowding into the low-roofed alleyway and crossing the familiar little courtyard in only a few minutes. Adrenaline was going to be messing with her time sense from here on in, stretching and contracting duration. Sam started checking her watch, the first stage in detaching events from her subjective responses. Falling into the familiar routine, she already felt her mind coming into tighter, clearer focus.
At the hidden door, she pushed past Behn and Teal’c and leaned down with Hamel to inspect the lock.
“I don’t suppose you have the key,” Sam said, remembering that Brenneka kept it in her pocket.
Hamel looked uncomfortable but resigned. “No. We’ll have to break it.”
Behind them rose a murmur, and she glanced back to see the little team finishing their reverential gesture, their faces clouded with concern. No one looked likely to volunteer to do the desecrating, so she nodded and waved Hamel out of the way.
Sam handed the zat to Teal’c and was winding up to deliver a kick to the latch when Hamel’s hand on her arm stopped her. Teal’c was already aiming the zat out of the circle of light at a bulky shadow in the middle of alley.
“It’s me.” The gruff rumble of a voice seemed more irritated than scared.
“Esa,” Hamel breathed next to Sam’s ear, and she could feel some of his tension release as he stepped around her. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.
Esa leaned around Teal’c with a wary glance at the zat and nodded at Sam. Like the rest of them, he was soaked, and his clinging shirt showed an impressive bulk of muscle on his squat figure. He wiped water out of his eyes with a thick-fingered hand and continued up over his knobby bald head in a gesture that reminded Sam of Hammond.
“You’ll need this,” he told Hamel. In his other hand was the gleam of a small key.
Several scenarios in rapid succession ran through Sam’s head to explain how Esa might have gotten Brenneka’s key, and some of them weren’t pretty. “How?” she asked.
He kept his eyes on Hamel as he answered. “It’s not right to break into our own house. Even Brenneka understands that.”
“She gave you the key.” Sam pondered the implications of even this minimal change of heart.
Esa jerked his chin at the door and gave no other answer. Then, without a word, he took the lantern from Hamel, turned, and was gone. Sam tried not to begrudge the loss of all that useful muscle, but a survey of the huddled shadows of the remaining troops made that a little hard.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said, watching Esa’s lumbering shape until it was swallowed by darkness and rain.
A moment later the rest of them were winding down the staircase, her boots and Teal’c’s ringing on the stone steps, everyone else cat-quiet and ghostly in the cold blue of the flash Brenneka had used on their first trip down here. The steps were slick from the water dripping off all of them, and she was certain that the chattering of her teeth was audible over the racket of their climbing. Ahead of her, Aadi’s shivering shoulders were up as high as his ears, goose-bumps like plucked chicken-skin on his bare neck. Behind her, Teal’c was a moving wall of cold. She wondered again about fever and then put that aside for now. He’d know what he needed, and his inside pockets were bulging with all the meds from the stolen packs, along with his tretonin injector. Soon, hopefully, he’d be back at the mountain, with Janet hovering over him and pointing out, with the resignation peculiar to armed forces doctors, that it was pretty stupid to go running around in the rain with a crispy hole in his side.
Once in the cavern, Hamel brought up the lights in the sconces and crossed the wide floor, detouring around the dais and finally kneeling at the foot of the scored wall of Ancient metal. His hands smoothing over the surface, up, out as far as he could reach, up again, he muttered something she couldn’t make out—that jump-rope cadence again—and a panel about five feet across popped outward and slid aside with the hissing resistance of hydraulics.
When Hamel twisted to look at her over his shoulder, his face was wrinkled up with a wide smile. “Your weapons,” he said, “and a few other things.”
That was a nice understatement. The “few other things” turned out to be a small arsenal. Sam crouched to peer inside, her hand steadying her on the upper edge of the door. She could make out a narrow crawlspace extending beyond the reach of the light stick. In neat rows along both walls were zats and staff weapons, the former hanging from a rail, the latter leaning at a steep angle between pegs. A quick count of what she could see came up with at least twenty staffs and twice as many zats. In a tidy row in the middle of the floor sat four spherical Goa’uld stun grenades and, beside them, an equal number of incendiary ones. Little Bangs and Big Bangs. Excellent.
Raising her eyebrows in surprise, she gave Hamel her best hundred-watt smile. “Not bad,” she admitted, deciding she’d better revise her first impression of these people and their whipped-dog passivity. “How did you manage this?” It was unlikely that missing weapons would be overlooked by Jaffa. She’d seen whole villages razed for less significant offenses.<
br />
Hamel was gazing into the crawlspace with an expression usually reserved for religious relics. “The mine collapses, Jaffa die. Small people can wriggle into small spaces, bring back things thought lost.” He looked at Aadi, who grinned proudly. Apparently, he was good at snagging more than rats for dinner. “The rest, mostly from Aris, smuggled on his ship from his outworld trips. Some, though, have been here for many years.” With a grunt, he moved into the storage space on his knees—a ragged petitioner, Sam thought—and started to hand out the weapons. “Some sit and pray—”
“And some meet the god on the road,” Teal’c finished for him, earning a rough, phlegmy laugh in return.
In the end, they decided that only Teal’c would carry a staff, since he was the only one able to use it effectively, both for firing and close-quarters fighting. The rest took zats—even Aadi, after Teal’c had made a case for him and Sam caved against her better judgment. In addition to her zat, Sam stuffed a stun grenade in one pocket of her jacket and an incendiary one in the other, adding two to Teal’c’s as well. It was an ungainly arrangement, the grenades inhibiting forward movement of their arms, but the benefits would probably outweigh the disadvantages.
They spared a few minutes to do the fastest small arms training ever, with only one small setback when one of the troops, Eche, the youngest after Aadi, accidentally zatted himself. Predictably, it didn’t have any effect, except that the look of surprise and then embarrassment on his thin face was a real keeper. Once Behn and the other two, Rebnet and Frey, had stopped falling over themselves laughing, they’d taken turns zatting each other. When they lost track of who’d shot whom, Sam learned a useful lesson: two zats would kill a normal person, while the average Atroposian was impervious if the zats were spaced more than a couple seconds apart. However, two zats delivered in rapid succession would actually drop an Atroposian like a bag of rocks, leaving the target semi-conscious for about half a minute. While they waited for the gang to lean Frey up against the wall to administer increasingly forceful smacks to the side of his face until he came to with a snarl and swatting hands, she and Teal’c decided that this explained why the Jaffa bothered to carry zats at all, given these people’s resistance to Goa’uld technology. They tabled speculation about what three shots would do, although continued snickering from the four stooges made her pretty tempted to experiment.
Aadi, at least, wasn’t too impressed and sulked against the dais, opening and closing his zat with mechanical regularity until Teal’c walked over and laid a heavy hand on the top of his head.
The troops armed, Hamel slid the door back over the hidey-hole and set off, not, as Sam had expected, in the direction of the stairs, but to the right of the Ancient wall. They descended deeper into the cavern, to where the light thinned from more distantly separated sconces and the elaborate mosaic on the floor gave way first to intermittent patches and then to plain, black stone. At this point, the vaulted ceiling angled sharply downward so that the cavern became a sloping tunnel with a broad entrance like a half-opened mouth. It seemed to sigh out the distant whisper of rushing water on a heavy, cold breath. In here, there were no sconces at all. Hamel shook his light stick again, but the blue glow did nothing except to make the darkness within seem more impenetrable.
Gathered close around Hamel as though the light were an island and the darkness a dangerous sea, the gang shuffled silently, their eyes wide, fingers clenched white-knuckled around the grips of the zats. Teal’c raised an eyebrow at Sam. Shrugging, she stepped out of the circle into blackness, then reached back to take the light from Hamel. She didn’t actually say abandon all hope out loud as, with varying degrees of reluctance, her tiny army trailed along behind her, downward into the belly of the beast.
Sleep hovered around Aris, inviting him into its seductive embrace. He pushed it away. He’d gone longer stretches without sleep before. Besides, he had to stay alert enough keep up with O’Neill. Deep lines of fatigue were etched across O’Neill’s face, but that kind of exhaustion could be overcome by a soldier. Aris would have staked his few possessions on the certainty that O’Neill could endure days without sleep on strength of will alone. He knew the type. Times like this, Aris had reason to appreciate the roshna; double doses kept him on his feet, but he was running low, and he’d have to cut back soon. He made fists, then relaxed them as his hands jittered and trembled, uncontrolled.
Sebek led their little procession now, a departure from how it had been since they entered the maze. They were following a hallucination, or maybe they weren’t. The shimmering woman appeared and disappeared at intervals, leaving them to find their own way, and all three of them were frustrated. Every so often Sebek stopped and pointed, speaking softly to O’Neill, whose posture was still as wary as ever as he listened and responded. Aris watched Sebek’s intent stare, the way his body moved, and tried to figure out how O’Neill could think that this was Daniel Jackson. The Goa’uld were good mimics—they got away with pretending all the time. He regretted losing control before, giving O’Neill a reason to align himself—even tentatively—with this other man, whoever he might be. It wasn’t impossible, not by any means, that O’Neill had picked up on something, some irrefutable sign, that this really was his friend. Aris had seen too many host bodies give out near this place, too many jumps from host to host, to think the Goa’uld had complete control. Even so, he was having trouble telling the difference between the interests of the two entities. That wasn’t something he would share with O’Neill. His plan and O’Neill’s plan didn’t need to match up. They’d work it out whenever they found their way to a stopping point. Then Aris would make up his own mind about Dr. Jackson, and whether or not he would have to go through Jackson to get to Sebek. The idea didn’t appeal to him, but he’d do it.
What bothered him most was that he’d been sure O’Neill was on the same page, until he’d stepped in front of Aris’ intent. He didn’t like the idea of killing O’Neill, but he’d do that, too, if he had to. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“Jack.” No deep reverberation; the symbiote was pretending to be the host again. Or maybe not. For the moment, Aris chose to think of that voice as belonging to Daniel Jackson. He might be proven wrong later, but it didn’t matter much at this point. Jackson was swaying, his lips parted, head tilted back as if he was listening to something Aris couldn’t hear. “Do you sense anything?”
O’Neill stopped and raised his hands to his head as if to block out sound and light, a gesture Aris was becoming familiar with. “Maybe.”
“You do,” Jackson said, sounding a little too excited for Aris’ taste. He moved to touch O’Neill on the shoulder, but O’Neill shied away like a skittish animal, and Jackson dropped his hand. “Is it what you saw before?”
“No. I don’t know.” O’Neill hesitated, then shook his head violently. “No.”
“Something else?”
“Why does it matter?” There was an angry, suspicious edge to O’Neill’s voice as he pushed back against Jackson’s curiosity, and Aris watched Jackson carefully for signs of the Goa’uld emerging, but he saw nothing but a sympathetic look on Jackson’s face. “You want a running commentary?” O’Neill snapped. “Everything that flies through my head?”
“No. But some of it might be important. Especially since you haven’t been touching the walls.” Jackson stared at O’Neill, until O’Neill nodded curtly. Aris’ eyes narrowed. Maybe it really was Jackson; in the way of friends who’d become accustomed to speaking without words, O’Neill seemed to be catching on to something Aris was missing. It was an interesting trick, but he’d never worked with anyone long enough to develop it.
O’Neill turned away toward the wall and leaned forward as if to rest his forehead against the cool stone, but jerked away at the last second. “I’m not going to activate anything by touching this, am I?”
“No symbols,” Jackson said. “No danger. Not that I can tell, anyway.”
“That’s reassuring,” O’Neill said, irony th
ick in his tone. His head dropped forward and he leaned there, at an angle to the wall, a solid, tilted line of tension. “Some of it’s inside my head, and some of it’s not,” he said, his voice muffled. “Stuff I’ve seen, stuff I’ve… done. Memories popping out of nowhere. You don’t need me to tell you about those.”
“Are you sure?” Jackson’s voice was soft.
O’Neill’s shoulders tensed. “Yeah.”
“Then what else?”
“Stars. Patterns of stars, I guess… I’m not sure. Like star fields. Maps, maybe.”
“Of this galaxy?” Aris asked. Jackson’s intent gaze shifted to him. “Hey, just asking. There has to be some point to this place, remember?”
Jackson nodded. “Can you tell, Jack?”
Aris had his own doubts about whether the human could even tell one star from another, but a moment later O’Neill said, “There aren’t any constellations I recognize.”
“Huh.” Jackson bit at his lip and his gaze grew unfocused.
“You planning to share or do I get to be the only one on the hot seat?” O’Neill demanded gruffly.
As if deciding whether or not to answer, Jackson glared at Aris and then said slowly, “My memories of Sha’re, at first, but other things, too. Almost anything triggers them, and I can’t stop Sebek from running off after them. He collects them like…” Jackson’s voice trailed off, then resumed, stronger. “Some of the images are so vivid, it’s as though I’m watching a movie, or reliving it.” Jackson lifted his arms and crossed them over his chest. “Sometimes, I can tell I’m reliving the sensation of being ascended.”
O’Neill turned his head toward Jackson. Aris couldn’t see his face, but whatever Jackson saw there was worthy of a brief half-smile. “Well, that sounds fun,” O’Neill said. “Remember anything useful?”
“Not really. Just a feeling of being weightless. Or… no. Bodiless. Not solid. And drifting, expanding.”