"Impossible," she murmured, and tried to take a step. Her leg collapsed. "Impossible..."
Her eyes fixed on Daniel, and he saw the feral glow of the hunter in them. Felt an answering bitter spark. Die, he thought. Just die, you evil bitch.
She gave him a smile that he knew would live in his nightmares and rolled up to her knees, then pressed shaking fingers to the controls on her hand device.
"You," she panted. "Your death I taste later, little hunter. We will have time."
Transport rings fell out of the sky, stacked, and she disappeared in a streak of blue light. When the rings left, there was nothing left except a pool of blood where she'd been, and the groan of shifting rubble from the building that had buried her Jaffa.
"Teal'c," Daniel whispered, and closed his eyes. "Oh God."
He sat up and began the hard, agonizing work of levering a stone pillar off of his trapped legs.
He passed out halfway through the process.
Okay, this is bad, Jack thought. Carter was watching him, with those blank eyes and huge pupils, and there was a fine, delicate vibration going through her body every five seconds or so. As if she was resonating to something Jack couldn't hear or feel.
"Carter?" he said, and kept his voice low and calm, as if talking to a wild animal about to spring. "Talk to me."
She didn't speak. They were in shadows again, sitting down; the moon was getting close to setting. Out in the darkness, they'd heard the firefight, but Jack couldn't leave her, and couldn't trust her at his back in any kind of a struggle.
So he sat, watching her, her watching him, both of them listening to the sound of their teammates fighting for their lives. The truth was he wouldn't have been able to get there with his ankle doing a good imitation of broken, and even if he had, it would have been over before he could have closed the distance.
And still, he hated himself for it.
"Daniel," Carter said. Just the one word, and then, slowly, as if sounding out a foreign language, "Teal'c."
"Yeah." He kept eye contact. He'd found out the hard way that it seemed to help her keep control. "Have to hope for the best."
"Help."
"Don't think we can, Captain."
She blinked, and he saw something change in her - not so much in her eyes, which were damn close to blind, but in her body language.
He felt something in that exposed, vulnerable place in the back of his neck, and risked a glance away from her.
They were surrounded. Shit.
Silent, black-robed figures. He hadn't heard a thing. They were that quiet, that fast, that deadly. He had both MP5s, but that wasn't going to help all that much. Too many bodies, too little time, and somebody was going to get to him.
Maybe Carter.
"Help," Carter repeated, and Jack saw one of the figures shift out of shadow into moonlight. He wished he could say it made him feel better to see it was Eseios, but the truth was none of this was making him feel better.
He brought the MP5 to fire position, steady on Eseios.
The man was carrying a Jaffa staff weapon, and there was blood splashed on his arms, his hands, his face. His eyes were as wide and dark as the black stone in his collar.
"Come," he said. He said it like Carter, as if the words no longer made sense to his mind and he had to consciously fit every sound together.
"Where?" Jack demanded.
If Eseios was capable of telling him, he didn't choose to; the figures still in the shadows seemed to melt away like ghosts. Eseios himself walked away, moving deceptively fast, and looked back over his shoulder at Jack with unmistakable irritation in his face.
"Come," he repeated, and slid down a small hill of rubble, out of sight.
Jack looked back at Carter, who had gotten to her feet without him noticing. She was vibrating again, but he didn't get a sense of imminent danger. Not that it necessarily would mean anything; she'd surprised him at every turn, so far. He'd probably still be thinking everything was a-okay when she stuck a dagger up his -
"Come," she said, and offered him a hand. He looked at it, then up at her face, and grabbed hold.
They moved pretty fast, with Carter's arm under his shoulders and his draped around her neck; awkward, but effective. The pain in his ankle had ratcheted up another notch - where was it now, eight? Getting close to the record - and he couldn't put more than half his weight on it, at best.
Not that she was letting him.
Whatever trail she was following, he couldn't spot it; apart from that one hallucinogenic vision of the Dark Company surrounding them, Jack saw no sign of them at all on the streets. No sound, either. It was suspiciously quiet. He couldn't check his watch, but the moon was sliding toward the horizon, so maybe the worst was over for the night. Carter's moonstone still showed a fraction of white, maybe an eighth of its surface.
Even making pretty good time, it took a couple of hours to close the distance to where they were heading, which seemed to be deeper into the city, toward the gleam of the Acropolis. It was close enough now to shine over the tops of the ruins, and Jack had an idea of how massive the thing was. Immense. Something on the scale of Ra's pyramid ship. Man, Daniel will drool...
If Daniel was still alive.
"Rest," he finally said, panting, and Carter stopped to let him slide down to a sitting position on some cracked stone steps. "How much farther?"
She crouched down, hands loose between her knees, and nodded down the street. Which didn't tell him much. He stretched out his cramping leg and swore softly at the pain. Whatever he'd managed to mess up in there was well and truly screwed; he was looking at a couple of weeks of rehab at the very least. Maybe surgical pins. Not like he didn't have some experience of that...
Carter grabbed him and hauled him back to his feet.
"Ah. Right. Moving on," he choked, and felt the world start to unravel at the edges when his weight came down wrong. Carter, either oblivious or not bothered by his moaning, dragged him forward. He managed to get going again, after a few drunken seconds, and focused hard. Weakness was not going to be rewarded.
Two more blocks, and then a sharp right turn, and then, suddenly, there were black robed Dark Company guys standing in the way. They parted to let the two of them through, and Jack saw Eseios crouched next to a fallen body, staff weapon held at ready position.
Defending it.
Jack sucked in a deep breath as he recognized Daniel, shoved free of Carter and hobbled forward without worrying about the pain. Pain was something you locked away, dealt with when you had to. Right now, he had other things to worry about.
He pressed his fingers to Daniel's cold, pale throat, and felt the rhythmic surge of a pulse. Thank you.
Eseios, who continued to hold the staff weapon like he was about to fight a small war, was glaring at the other hunters, including Carter. When he looked up, Jack saw why. Daniel was down, wounded; Jack was prey, pure and simple. Even Carter was looking tempted. The rest of the Dark Company... feral. Predatory. Ready to spring.
"Teal'c?" He yelled it. "Teal'c!"
"O'Neill."
The voice was weak, and came from somewhere off to his left. Nothing there but an impenetrable wall of rubble. Jack looked up and saw a bombed-out shell of a building with half its outer wall slagged into volcanic glass...
... and Teal'c. Burned, bloody, but aiming his staff weapon down at the hunters surrounding him and Daniel.
"You okay?" Jack asked. Teal'c nodded. "Can you get down here? I need you to help me with Daniel."
"A moment."
It was longer than that, and the Teal'c who finally dropped down out of that broken jagged window didn't look like the same Jaffa he knew. He looked slow, clumsy, and just two steps behind Jack in the injury race. He limped over, and Jack got a good close look at his face. Blistered. His shoulder was bleeding freely from a deep gash.
"Your version of okay looks worse than mine," Jack told him.
"My symbiote will heal me. I have had more serious
injuries."
"Let's hope he has, too." Jack pointed down at Daniel. "Help me get this thing off him." He grabbed one end of the column and heaved; Teal'c barely broke a sweat, lifting the other and flinging it aside. Jack hissed in agony when he had to go down on one knee to field-check Daniel for injuries. "He's out. I don't think his legs are broken. Can you carry him?"
Teal'c shook his head.
"Yeah, me neither." Jack looked at the hunters, checked his watch, and said, "We wait for morning. Got a deck of cards?"
Before dawn, Daniel started to stir. By that time, Teal'c was already improving. The blisters had receded to an uncomfortable-looking texture, and the wound on his shoulder had stopped bleeding entirely. Daniel had woken from time to time to murmur Sha're's name and phrases that Jack assumed might have been Abydonian, but for all he knew might have been in one of the twenty-something other languages the archaeologist spoke.
If Teal'c understood any of it, he didn't let on.
When Daniel did come out of it, it was abrupt, as if somebody had flipped a switch. He sat straight up and went berserk, yelling in - again, a guess - Abydonian; Jack held on and talked to him until he felt some of the tension easing away. "You're okay, Daniel," Jack finally said, and let go.
Daniel sat up slowly, feeling his head as if trying to press the pain out. "Jack..." He twisted to give him a wordless look, then turned to Teal'c. "Teal'c, I thought you were - "
"I am fine, Daniel Jackson. I am relieved to find you are well."
"Don't know if this qualifies as well..." Daniel pressed his forehead and looked nauseated. "Artemis. Sha're was - "
He stopped talking and leaned forward to hide his face in his hands. Jack moved to sit next to him, between him and Eseios, and the other hunters who were still prowling the perimeter.
"Oh God, Jack," Daniel whispered. "God." He sounded shaken. Dangerously shaken. "Where's Sam - "
"She's fine. She's right there." Jack indicated her with a jerk of his chin; she was sitting against a wall, hands on her knees, watch ing them. Still had the predator's shine in her eyes, but it was fading. "Talk to me, Daniel."
That got nothing but silence. Daniel sat, head in his hands, as the dark spun into day, and the pale blue sun rose in half-hearted glory over the horizon.
And then Eseios put his bloodied hand on Jack's shoulder and said, in an utterly exhausted voice, "My men will help you now."
-t took half the morning to get back to the Dark Company's camp. When they arrived, it looked like a completely different place. Eseios led them into the big, open area that Jack guessed had once been a theater, and it was full of people with a purpose - armed men patrolling the entrances, women and children cooking and washing clothes and sewing together rags for tents or cloaks or blankets. A living, breathing settlement.
Some people looked hungry, but nobody was starving.
"My wife unlocks the cage at dawn," he said, when he saw the question on Jack's face. "We come home to this. It is - helpful."
"Eseios!" Briseis came running, then slowed when she saw him. The joy in her face flickered when she saw the blood on him, then turned determinedly back on full shine. "You are safe, husband."
"We lost six," he said. He sounded exhausted, and sank down on a camp stool that looked as if it had seen better days as a pile of scraps. It creaked, but held his weight. "I - I tried not to - I will speak with their women. Landes had a son..."
"Later," she said, and touched his hair with gentle fingers, then turned away to snap out an order for water. Someone lugged in three full pails. Eseios washed his hands and face clean, then cleared the way for the next man who needed to wash away the night, the hunger, the blood. Some spit and rinsed rust from their mouths.
SG-1 watched, silent but still together. And none of them, Jack reflected, was having to wash murder away.
Not yet.
Briseis turned back to them, frowning, and said, "The boy who came last night, Pylades. He wanted to talk with you. Will you...?"
"Yeah," Jack said, and sighed. "Guess we'll go to him." His ankle reported it had a problem with this plan. He told it, for the forty-fifth time this morning, to shut the hell up and follow orders.
Surprisingly, Briseis shook her head. "He is as bad as you and your friends. I have not been able to keep him resting," she said. "I will get him. Stay." She shoved a pail of water into Jack's hands. "Drink."
It was clean and fresh, out of the underground cistern; he drank until the water felt heavy and glassy in his stomach, then passed it to Carter. She shared with Teal'c and Daniel first, then took two mouthfuls and splashed handfuls over her sweaty face. As she mopped the moisture from her skin she looked a little better. Maybe. Daniel concentrated on wiping his mouth but - Jack watched carefully - it wasn't to get rid of the taste of blood. Apparently.
This was going to be one hell of a debrief, if they ever managed to make it home.
"Jack!"
It was the kid, Pylades, coming fast but still supported by Briseis. He was bandaged, and one arm was strapped securely down. His face was thick and purple with bruises, one eye swollen nearly shut.
"Hey, kid." Jack offered his hand, and Pylades gripped it with furious strength, then sank down to a sitting position on the sandy ground. Briseis lingered, frowning at all of them as if she was tempted to put them in some kind of traction, and finally went to speak with her husband. "You look better."
Pylades shook that aside. "I was lucky," he said. "You - the four of you - I did not believe you, before. But now I think you can do anything. You survived - and the goddess was hunting you - "
"The goddess has a great big hole in her gut," Jack said grimly. Daniel had told them that much, somewhere between all of the Abydonian speech. "Whether or not it will kill her is anybody's guess."
"Kill...?" Pylades shook his head. "She can't die. So Iphigenia told me. The goddess wears many forms. One body dies, another - "
"That's true, Jack, she could have transferred to another host," Daniel said. "Though God, I hope not. Was there a sarcophagus?" Pylades looked blank. "You went to the temple, right?"
"Her guards found us. They took us there," he said. "The goddess - the goddess weighed our hearts and found me unworthy. She gave me to her guards and said I was to be sacrificed." Jack saw the panic surface in his face for a few seconds, and then the kid locked it down. "I won fr ee, but I couldn't get to Iphigenia. I came here for help."
Daniel wasn't about to be shaken from his question. "Did you see a box, longer than a man - gold - big enough for a coffin - tomb...?"
Pylades frowned. "I saw something. It might have been an altar - gold, and there were strange symbols on it. There was a moon above it, a black moon on a field of stars. Gods witness, I don't know - they took me to the back - I tried to get to my sister - "
Jack's turn to get him off the subject. "How many people in the temple? Counting the Jaffa?"
"I don't know. Not many. It - it feels like a place of burial. Many - " His face was sickly white. "Many dead. The smell - but there are guards, still. I don't think you can defeat them alone, I think, even with your weapons. She has weapons, too. Terrible..."
He had a bum on his forehead. Jack knew what kind of weapon did that, he'd seen its effects on Daniel, first-hand.
The kid had tried to protect his sister. No question about that.
Pylades' Adam's apple bobbed as he struggled for control. There were tears in his eyes. Jack waited, and saw Daniel look away, studying something in the distance. Teal'c was impassive, but then, when wasn't he? Only Carter reached out to the boy, and put her hand on his shoulder.
It steadied him, mainly (Jack suspected) because he didn't want to look weak in front of a woman. Even a woman with automatic weapons.
"We'll get her back," Carter said, and Jack shot her a sharp, frowning look. He didn't like promises like that, with all kinds of hairpin turns and impossible odds. Try to get her back, that was better.
But Pylades was already taking
it for granted. "Thank you," he said, and sighed. "She's so young... the goddess recognized her as a Seer. I do not think she will hurt her."
Yeah, Jack thought cynically. She's the soul of reason, old Artie.
"She leaves her lair at night." Eseios still had that night-predator stealth; he'd slipped up unnoticed. Briseis was beside him, hands clasped over the barely-visible swell of her baby. "Most of her guards go with her as well. This we know. During my second Hunt, I sent white-collars to observe the temple during nightfall and report the movements of anyone inside. Those left inside number less than half those who are there in the day."
"Anything else?" Jack asked.
"Most of the Acropolis is a tomb," he said softly. "Her victims multiply and cry to heaven. She lives in only a few central rooms, we think. And she has gone mad."
"Ya think?... So we hit her hard, after dark. She's away doing the crazy thing, we get the control crystal to the DHD..."
"No," Daniel said. "Jack... "
"Daniel, it's a decent plan. We get inside, ransack the place, find what we need. If Snake-girl comes home, well, great. One less Goa'uld in the universe."
"Jack."
He met his eyes, harassed. "Daniel?"
The man took in a deep, unsteady breath. "Night is after dark. Sam and I... we can't be counted on to help. Just the opposite, actually. I think she could use us against you."
"I would go," Pylades spoke up instantly.
"Yeah, big help, kid." Jack's mind was racing, reading the message in Daniel's averted eyes, Carter's blank, empty expression. They'd lost themselves, last night, in a way Jack couldn't begin to understand. It was like Goa'uld possession, only the next day you remembered everything, knew what you'd done... worse than playing house with a snake, wasn't it? Because at least the host probably wouldn't know what was happening, what its body was being forced to do. For Sha're's sake, for Skaara's, he hoped that was true. "Okay, you and Carter stay here..."
"No." Eseios sounded definite about it. "If you tie them, they will die - my men will slaughter them, I can't stop that. Let them run. Let them hunt."
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 19