... and Daniel heard, in the silence after, the soft metallic sound of a collar coming open. Then another. And a third.
He saw fear blaze hot in her eyes.
Her fear turned to hatred, lightning-quick, and she ignited the hand device against his skull.
He screamed. Fire ripped through him, then acid-tipped needles, and he knew it was going to kill him this time, rip everything inside of him into bloody shreds. One second. Two. Three. A million years of pain.
And then it stopped, and he opened his eyes to see Iphigenia scrambling backwards as Teal'c lunged. His collar dropped free as he moved; she dodged him and ran around the sarcophagus, only to be blocked by the two Dark Company men, who were coming out of their stupor, too.
Iphigenia - no, Artemis - held out her hand threateningly, staring at them in rising panic. Three staff weapons leveling on her now, and Daniel rolled painfully to his feet and pointed the Beretta, too.
She had nowhere to run.
"You will go from this place," she said, clinging to some shreds of haughty dignity. "I will permit you to leave."
"Surrender or die," Teal'c said. "Choose."
The soft, pretty face convulsed in fury, and she shouted the words back in a voice so distorted Daniel had trouble understanding them. "No! No, I will not! I rule this world!"
Two more shadows loomed at the door, both bearing MP5s. Jack and Sam, looking out of breath. They took up firing positions with smooth precision, and Jack's gaze darted fast to Daniel. "Hey. You okay?"
"Okay," he said. It was about all he could manage. His head felt as if he'd been pounded with a mallet. He was sure his nose was bleeding. "Artemis - has Iphigenia."
"I figured," Jack said. His eyes were bitter and furious. "Breaking news, Artie. Your Jaffa are toast. You don't control these people anymore. You can thank Captain Carter here for that..."
"I will chase you, and it will be a daylight hunt such as this city has never seen, my Jaffa will run you down and I will strip the skin from your bodies while you scream... I will slaughter these rebellious helots and demand tribute! I will rule here!"
"Over my dead body," Jack said. "Go ahead. Try it."
She raised her hand, and Teal'c broke from cover, sliding on the slick marble floor feet first to slam into her knee-high from behind. She collapsed with a surprised squeak, and he rolled her over, on her face, and pinned her down with one huge hand on her back. She thrashed and screamed furiously, clawing at the floor, and Daniel moved to kneel at her side to pull the device off of her arm.
He handed it to Jack, who took it between a thumb and forefinger like a dead rat, turned, and tossed it to Sam. She examined it for a few seconds, then shoved it in a pocket of her vest.
"Iphigenia!" Daniel looked up to see Pylades in the doorway - bruised, leaning on the support of a confiscated staff weapon, backed by what looked like more of the Dark Company. "What are you doing? What have you done to my sister?"
Daniel slowly got to his feet and went to meet him. "I'm sorry," he said. "Artemis -Artemis took her. We were too late."
Pylades pushed past him and knelt down, stroking Artemis's brown hair; she was still struggling against Teal'c's hold, screaming like a wild thing. Harsh, keening screams of madness. "Hush, sister - Iphigenia - don't - it's all right, it will be all right now..." The boy looked pleadingly at Daniel, tears in his eyes. "Can the evil be cast out of her?"
"No," Daniel said, and hated himself for it. "I'm sorry. I wish I could say she'd be all right, but - she's been possessed by the goddess. Artemis. We don't know how to take it out again."
"No. No, my sister is Iphigenia, she is good and kind and gentle - she saw that we would live, she is a Seer, she saw it, this can't betrue - "
Teal'c said, "She will live for as long as the Goa'uld within her wishes. But she will not be your sister."
"But I have to take her home! I promised I would take her home. My father - my father said I was to protect her - " His voice went thin and dry. "Protect her."
"You did." Jack put a hand on the boy's shoulder and squeezed. "You tried."
Artemis screamed and fought the floor, pinned in place by Teal'c's strength.
"Sir?" Carter asked. She was back at the door, facing out at an angle, watching their backs, but she risked wide-eyed glances toward them. "What are we going to do with her?"
Daniel made it a question. "Take her back... ?"
"Not taking this back to Earth, Daniel. She's too dangerous."
Pylades looked up. "She is my sister, I will take her home, we will care for her there -"
"Pylades, this isn't your sister. This is a Goa'uld - a god." Jack's face spasmed in dislike when he said it. "She'll kill anybody she gets her hands on. She may pretend to be your sister until she gets what she wants, but she'll kill and keep on killing, and sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with her as she is, not as you remember her."
"You mean you want to kill her."
Nobody seemed to want to answer that. Daniel realized the pistol was still in his sweaty hand. He slid it back into the holster and scrubbed his palm convulsively against his trouser leg.
Jack sighed. "Carter. Give her a shot, strongest thing you've got. See if you can knock her out."
Carter darted over, took out the medkit and selected from the colorcoded array; she pressed the hypo against the girl's arm, and within a few seconds Artemis stopped screaming and writhing. She didn't stop talking, though. Her words came slow and deliberate, but they still came, promising death and destruction and tortures that Daniel had only read about in historical texts. Teal'c hauled her up and pinned her hands behind her. Artemis lolled her head drunkenly to one side, and under the maenad's veil of hair her eyes were glassy and sharp, Goa'uld.
And then they slowly slid closed, and she collapsed limp in Teal'c's arms.
"The Goa'uld will resist your drugs," Teal'c said. "There is not much time."
Daniel felt a lurch that might have been horror, might have been hope; the two were getting strangely mixed, here. "The sarcophagus," he blurted. "What if we put her in the sarcophagus? It's where Ra slept. Maybe..."
"Teal'c?" Jack interrupted. "Can she get out of it?"
"If the mechanism is disabled, she will not be able to open the device from the inside."
"And she'll sleep while she's inside, right?"
Teal'c studied the girl and didn't answer. Daniel felt cold crawl up his spine. What if she stays awake? What if it's just one long, unending imprisonment in the dark... ?
Jack read him like a book. "Daniel," he said quietly. "It's this or..." Or a bullet, he meant.
Daniel closed his eyes and nodded.
Teal'c pressed the button to open the sarcophagus.
"Oh God," Daniel murmured. Artemis was whispering in slow but rising words. "She's waking up."
"I gave her enough to put down a horse, sir," Sam said. "Another dose - I don't know. It could kill her anyway."
Jack mutely shook his head, staring at the sarcophagus. The wings grated open.
Teal'c laid the girl's slender body down in the brightly lit interior.
"No!" Pylades lunged forward as the wings began to close. "No, you can't, she's alive, my sister is alive - the evil must come out of her! I can't just abandon her... !"
Jack grabbed him from behind and held him still.
Just before the wings closed, Artemis's eyes snapped open, and pulsed with Goa'uld fire, and she fastened a hating stare on Daniel.
She said, "If you would find your wife, look in the gardens. I have seen her there." An evil, malicious smile. It didn't belong on the face of a child.
He took a step back, shocked, and then the sarcophagus sealed over her.
Teal'c pressed buttons until they glowed a steady red. "It is locked, O'Neill."
Pylades put his hand on the living tomb of his sister, and wept.
Daniel turned, heading for the exit; he heard Jack call his name but ignored it. Sam held out a hand to stop him. He moved
around her and hit the door at a run.
Dead Jaffa in the throne room, nothing moving. He kept going.
"Daniel!" Sam caught up with him and grabbed at his shoulder to yank him to a stop. "Where the hell are you going?"
"You heard. Sha're could be here - "
"No. Daniel, no."
He broke free and kept moving. Sam activated her radio; whatever Jack said, Daniel guessed the end of it was an order to stay on his trail and keep him from getting killed. He supposed there might still be Jaffa around. He didn't particularly care.
The next room held three living people, all dressed in black robes, wandering around looking stunned. Raw red marks on their necks where collars had been. Daniel paused next to a window and saw that there were torches out there in the dark, groups moving toward the Acropolis.
Coming to destroy their gods.
They ran into the Dark Company on the way. "Daniel!" It wasn't Sam's voice this time; he turned and was caught up in a bruising strongman's hug, and Eseios smacked him on the back hard enough to bruise a rib. "You live. And your friends?"
"So far," he agreed. The man was grinning. His people were behind him, or at least most of them; many were holding the hands of their wives, their children, their lovers. Briseis had come, too. She stepped forward to fold Daniel in a much gentler embrace.
"Artemis?" she asked.
"Won't be hurting you any more," Daniel said. "You're free. You can go home now."
"You see?" She smiled luminously at him. "Your plan was not stupid. I believed in you."
Eseios looked put out.
"No, it was stupid," Daniel said seriously. "It just worked... do you know where the gardens would be?"
"Gardens," Eseios repeated, and exchanged a look with one of his men. "Adaios went that way. He will show you. But Daniel - "
"Thanks." He extended his hand. Eseios took it and pulled him into another hug and back slap.
He followed the Dark Company soldier out of the room, Sam shadowing his heels. They went through several rooms, these looking abandoned; treasures in every one, but Daniel kept his eyes straight forward, on the back of his guide.
I have seen your wife in the garden. Artemis had pretended to be Sha're. She must have seen her...
The Dark Company soldier - Adaios? - stopped and turned to them. "I went no farther," he said. "You should not, either. This is a place the gods have deserted"
He walked away, and Daniel moved to the door. It was shut, but the handle moved smoothly in his hand...
The stench hit him first. He choked and covered his mouth and nose, and behind him he heard Sam do the same.
Garden. Maybe it had been a garden, once. All that grew here now were the dead, piles of them, stacks of decaying flesh and disarticulated bone.
"Oh God," Sam whispered, and grabbed his shoulder. "No, Daniel. Stop."
I have seen your wife in the garden.
He turned and looked at her, and whatever was in his face, she let go. Her eyes glittered with tears for a second, and then she blinked and was Captain Carter again, cool and military and professional.
"All right," she said. "We'll look."
They weren't alone for long. Eseios came, and Briseis, and the Dark Company. Pylades, still pale with grief for his lost sister. A flood of people Daniel didn't know, and a few he recognized. Alsiros, still stained with old blood, trembling and pale. Two others from that doomed Sikyon group. Each took Sha're's picture in hand and looked at it, then murmured prayers and moved away to look into the dead faces. Cries echoed through the still-beautiful marble of the building, as friends or lovers or family found their lost ones.
"Let me see," a rough voice said, and Daniel looked up, numbed, to see an old man standing in front of him, hand extended. He studied Sha're's picture for a moment, then showed it to the women and children gathered around him. At least twenty of them. He'd brought his whole refugee camp, at least those enough strong enough to walk.
"Laonides," he said.
"Daniel. Like me, you are a survivor." Laonides looked pleased with himself. He gestured for the children clustered nearby to look at the corpses; Daniel felt a surge of misery, and reached out to grab him by the robe.
"No. Take them out of here."
"These children? They have seen worse."
"I don't care." Daniel focused on the man's eyes. "You're a survivor. If you want to survive five minutes more, you'll take them away from here. Right now."
Laonides studied him, face settling into a frown, and nodded. He clapped his hands and told them to leave the garden, and the women and children hurried to obey him. Eseios was watching. He and Laonides exchanged a flat look that sparked like crossed swords.
"Still the hunter, aren't you?" Laonides said to Daniel. "Artemis chose better than any of us like to admit."
"My friend told you to get out." Eseios walked toward him. "Bring your women and children to my camp at dawn."
"And if I don't?"
"Then Daniel is right: you won't survive this Hunt." He showed teeth. "And I am a hunter, old man. Black stone or no. Make no mistake about it."
Laonides bowed slightly, and walked away. He stopped to look at a corpse with dark hair near the bottom of a pile of bodies, moved her hair and shrugged.
"One woman is very like another," he said, and looked at Daniel directly. "Call her gone, boy, and move on. You can't spend your life staring at the dead."
Sam's hand on his shoulder was all that kept him from going for Laonides' throat, but then the gray misery closed in again, and there were bodies to move.
Sha're wasn't there.
He didn't find her.
"How many?" Jack asked, as Carter took a weary seat next to him at the campfire. She'd scrubbed with disinfectant soap, both skin and clothes, and looked clean but exhausted. She propped her chin on raised knees and folded arms.
"Six hundred eighty-nine," she said. "But it's not over. They're finding bodies in half the Acropolis. Some date back several hundred years, according to Daniel. Pylades was right: this place was a tomb. It's appalling."
He hated to ask it, but... "No sign of Sha're, right?"
"None." Carter fluffed her damp hair absently. "I don't think he really expected there to be, but... "
"Had to try."
"Yes sir."
He handed her an MRE. "Country Captain Chicken," he said. "Your favorite."
She managed a wan smile, ate about three mouthfuls and yawned. Dawn was on the way, coming fast, and Jack felt the drag, too. Even Teal'c had settled down into some kind of zen yoga thing.
Daniel was still walking, out there in the darkness. Jack got up and went looking.
He found him standing on an outcropping of stone, surrounded by thin, whispery pines; overhead, the moon floated huge and white and - for once - innocent. The ruins of the Great City spread out from the base of the hill in broken concentric circles.
"Hey," Jack ventured. He wasn't sure the younger man even heard him. "Getting late."
Daniel nodded. He looked exhausted. "This place. It was beautiful once, don't you think?"
"Whatever. Get some sleep."
"Why? We're going back tomorrow. I'll sleep when I'm home." Daniel's lips tightened. "When I'm lying down on clean sheets, anyway-
"Yeah... about that, listen, how's the house-hunting going? I'm only asking because I think General Hammond wants those VIP quarters back, or he's going to start charging nightly rates. Call it the SGC Hilton."
"Don't."
Jack leaned against a convenient pine trunk. "Don't what?"
Daniel shook his head. "Don't patronize me."
Right. Jack crossed his arms and studied the toes of his boots. "Fine. She wasn't here. She was never here."
"I know that."
"We saved these people." No answer. "We can send them home." Nothing. "Daniel... "
"Pylades wants us to take a message back," Daniel said. "He's not going home. He's staying here to guard his sister. Eseios and Brisei
s aren't going, either. They think they can rebuild something. I think they're afraid their families wouldn't be too happy about a marriage made in hell, and apparently there's a real problem with intermarrying between planets. They're not the only ones... Jack, what if the tribute planets don't believe us? What if they keep sending people?"
"Then I think Eseios and Pylades will send them right back, with a nice little note. It'll change. Things change."
"Do they?" Daniel's glasses caught moonlight. "Maybe. That's something to hope for, anyway."
They stood together in silence for a while, and then Daniel said, "How's the ankle?"
"Miserable. Thanks for asking. Hurts like hell."
"You should be sitting down."
"And yet, tramping around in the dark after you." Jack debated it, and then he decided to go ahead and say it. "Laonides is a total bastard, but he's right about one thing. You can't look for Sha're in every face you see, living or dead. You know that, right?"
Daniel sucked in a deep, wounded breath, then let it out in a cloud of silver.
"Come. Sit, if you're not going to sleep." Jack led the way at a slow, exhausted hobble. "I've got cookies."
"What kind?"
"Chocolate chip."
"Okay." Daniel took one last look at the moonlight, and followed.
On the way back to the Stargate the next day, they had an escort of more than a hundred. It kept growing as they moved through the city; Eseios picked up an irritating habit of yelling out an exaggerated account of their battles to draw people out of hiding.
There were fallen collars all over the streets. Somebody had even tried to bum a pile of them, to no effect; Jack thought it was a pretty good idea. Maybe staff blasts would melt the things.
They found Artemis's black-painted Death Glider landed in a pile of rubble, a couple of miles down the road; the hatch was open, and one dead Jaffa lay nearby. Decoy. She'd known they were coming to the Acropolis that night. They'd been lucky, Jack realized; lucky she was crazy, and that Daniel was even crazier.
It was, strangely, a much shorter march from that point on. "Downhill," Jack observed. He was feeling pretty good, since he'd finally allowed Carter to hit him with a fat dose of painkillers. The anklethrob had subsided to an occasional, dreamy pulse.
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 22