It was good to be away from the pounding in the mine. Sam’s head felt a little clearer already, except for a roaring in her ears that came from the inside. It was hard to see through it, think through it. She resisted pressing her fists against her ears or rubbing them across her eyes. Instead, she counted intersecting hallways, left turns, right turns. Modeled after the ha’tak, whose shadow sliced across the city and blocked out the light of twin moons, the complex seemed reassuringly familiar. The Goa’uld weren’t innovative. They organized their space predictably. It wouldn’t be hard to find their way out again, after they’d taken care of the Jaffa. After they’d taken care of Aris Boch.
Up ahead of her, the Colonel’s fingers tapped out an uneven rhythm on his thigh as he walked; he was counting, too. When he turned his head to look down a passageway, she could see him in profile. His face was expressionless. Behind her, Teal’c was probably making a similar survey of the complex, although for him it would be more of a refresher course than anything else. A hundred years following prisoners through the corridors of Goa’uld motherships and bunkers would leave their mark in his memory, indelible as the lines in his palm. Even though she knew from experience where the brig was within the rectangular base of the structure, she counted hallways anyway. Her mind was still a little unruly and not counting meant thinking about Daniel.
He would be conscious, she knew. He’d watch his hands move, and the gestures would be all wrong. When Daniel was Daniel, he would read the writing on the vault door and his fingers would spread out, steepled and stiff above the incised figures— all those dancing human forms and intersecting curves that looked like animals balanced on mountains or wave crests— and he’d follow along each line like the physical movement of his hand through the air could restrain his brain a little, keep it from rushing ahead. Sebek wouldn’t know this. Sebek would use Daniel’s hands all wrong.
Sam balled her fists. The Colonel’s hands hung open at his sides. She took a few deep breaths and made her fingers uncurl.
“Here,” Aris said. The entourage stopped, two Jaffa on either side of the cell door.
The brig was a little different from the ones she’d been in on the motherships. The same exterior wall of horizontal bars, a door set into a solid wall, activated by a code on a touchpad. There were two other cells, one on either side, both empty. Sam thought of the people she’d seen scrabbling up the piles in the mine, following the carts, stumbling back down again into the black-rock darkness, or the ones sleeping huddled up against the fractured walls of the city, trying to absorb some of the dissipating heat of the day from the stone. They were rags and angles, and when they watched the Jaffa pass with their prisoners, there was nothing in their eyes, not even fear. Aris didn’t even turn his head to look at them. The whole planet was a prison. Sebek didn’t have much to be worried about.
She couldn’t think of Sebek without the image of Daniel’s face invading her mind. Sebek would carry Daniel’s weight wrong. He wouldn’t tilt his head back and let his mouth fall open while he was thinking; ‘the genius guppy look’ the Colonel called it sometimes, when he was pretending to be annoyed. Daniel would feel the wrongness of Sebek’s gestures, the horror of them. She shuddered. Sebek had smiled. He’d raised Daniel’s head, and there had been blood on his lips, and he’d looked at her.
The roaring in her ears made her feel sick. She followed the Colonel into the cell, stepped aside to let Teal’c in after her. They all turned to face Aris.
“You son of a bitch,” the Colonel said, matter-of-factly, like he was noting how old Aris was, or that it was raining outside.
“I told him to work faster,” Aris answered. “Now, he’ll work faster.” He slapped the panel on the wall. “On the bright side, maybe now I won’t have to break any more of your fingers,” he added as the door slid shut.
“Well, there’s that,” the Colonel replied with a bitter half-smile. He walked to the open bars of the exterior wall so that he could watch Aris walk away, taking three of the Jaffa with him. His jaw worked for a moment, then he turned to face Sam and Teal’c. “Options, people. Let’s hear it.”
“Sebek knows what Daniel knows,” Sam said. “Codes, everything.”
Teal’c added, “If Sebek is in service to Lord Yu, he will be able to earn much favor in return for this knowledge. The System Lords will make good use of it.”
She nodded her agreement. “Especially if we can’t warn the SGC that security has been compromised.”
This wasn’t news to Jack. “I asked for options.”
Sam frowned and went to the door. There was no control panel on this side. Reluctantly, she faced him. “Escape. Get Daniel. Steal a ship or find the Stargate, if there is one. Remove the Goa’uld.”
“That’s what I like about your plans, Carter. They’re elegant in their simplicity.” He reached to pull his hat off, and remembering that he’d lost it, scrubbed at his hair instead, his face pulled into a scowl that made the notch between his eyebrows deeper under the livid red mark from the ribbon device. He leaned back and angled his face closer to the bars to get a look out into the hall, where the Jaffa was watching them. He waggled his fingers at him. “How ya doin’?” After a moment of getting nothing on that front, he shuffled stiffly to the far side of the cell, slid down the wall and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. His broken finger stuck out at an angle.
“You okay, sir?” Sam asked, coming to crouch beside him. When he dropped his hands, she peered closely at the burns on his forehead. There were a few small blisters starting. It had been close.
“My brain feels like scrambled eggs, but I don’t have a snake in my head, so I’m doing better than some.” As she sat back on her heels, he pinned her with a gaze that was sharper than it had a right to be after what Sebek had done to him. “What the hell happened?”
Teal’c disengaged from his staring contest with the Jaffa guard and settled onto one knee in front of them. He looked over his shoulder in the direction of the guard before turning back and speaking in a low rumble. “We were disabled, as were Sebek’s Jaffa. Sebek himself was in distress.”
“Or the host was,” Sam speculated.
The Colonel’s gaze sharpened even more. “Disabled how?”
She could tell he had an idea but was still gathering the pieces.
“You felt it, too, sir, in the antechamber. Pain, headache, nausea, um…paranoia.” She winced an unvoiced apology in the Colonel’s direction. “And—” She faltered a little as she tried to grope for words to describe it.
“Memory,” Teal’c finished for her.
That was it. The word seemed to snap the disorientation, the disjointed images, the wild swings of emotion into context. She nodded and settled back against the wall next to the Colonel. It was difficult to pin down: a memory, but not just pictures. “I could feel it,” she said. “I wasn’t just remembering. I was feeling it.”
“What?” the Colonel asked.
She pressed her lips shut for a moment. “Jolinar. But not just her.” Shaking her head in frustration, she tried to sort it out. “Her memories, but…not her point of view.”
Involuntarily, her hands clenched into fists on her knees. There was a sickening lurch inside as she thought about the antechamber, Sebek aiming the ribbon device at the Colonel. Daniel had been so still, his glasses reflecting the killing red. She’d been facing off against a Jaffa, and he’d been coming at her, but he’d stopped, clutched at his stomach, fingers scrabbling at his pouch. She’d been able to hear the squeaking scream of the symbiote inside him. Of course she couldn’t have; the sound had been in her head, but it had been more than that. It had been coming at her from outside, and it had been inside her, winding around her spine, a voice hissing in her brain.
“Hosts,” she whispered. Her fingernails were making tiny crescent cuts in her palms. How many millennia were encoded in Jolinar’s DNA? Generations. The Nascian man she took had been terrified. The memory twisting at the base of her skull, she opened her eyes, focused on Teal’c’s stony face.
She’d fallen and the pain in her knees when she’d hit the stone floor of the antechamber had shocked her back to herself again. When she’d looked up, Daniel was raising his head and there was blood on his lips, and he’d smiled.
Her voice was thick. “I’m sorry, sir. I tried to get to him, I swear.”
Teal’c’s expression didn’t change, but he managed to convey sympathy anyway. “I, too, was overcome with sensations.” Now his scowl deepened. “Adoration for the god, Sebek,” he clarified, like he was confessing crimes. “It was most unpleasant.”
“False god,” O’Neill said.
“False god,” Teal’c agreed.
Tilting her head so she could see the Colonel’s face better, Sam asked, “You, sir?”
One eye closed in a wince as he looked into the middle distance and then down at his hands in his lap. “Kanan,” he said finally.
“Oh,” Sam said, and that was totally inadequate and also way too much. She averted her gaze, accidentally caught Teal’c doing the same, his eyes on the floor in front of him like he was observing a moment of silence or waiting for someone to hit him, and that wasn’t good to see, either. The ghost memory twisted at the back of her head, and she lifted a hand to rub at it, just as the Colonel was doing the same, their elbows bumping. He flicked a look sidelong at her, a stiletto blade of warning and a taut wire of connection. When she dropped her hand, he raised his to his neck, fingers digging into the spaces between his vertebrae.
She watched his fingers grinding into his neck and the roaring seethed up in her ears like foam on boiling water. As noisy as it was in her head, the silence in the cell was heavy, the kind that dust settles in, disturbed only by the infrasound vibration of the distant crushers and the even thud of pacing Jaffa boots. Still on one knee, Teal’c was motionless except for his eyes, which followed the guard as he passed slowly back and forth outside the bars. When he was beginning his fifth circuit, Teal’c turned back to Sam and the Colonel and raised his eyebrow.
“Kind of lively for a stationary picket, don’t you think?” O’Neill said.
Sam mirrored Teal’c’s nod. “Not exactly palace guard, sir,” she said.
The speculative expression on the Colonel’s face faltered for just a second, and she knew that, like her, he was thinking of Teal’c back in the early days, standing motionless for all the hours of his watch at the doorway of their quarters on one of their first missions. Daniel had been observing him the entire time. He and Teal’c had spent the rest of the long night discussing Jaffa discipline and total commitment to assigned duties. Daniel had filled up half his field journal with notes.
“They remain agitated,” Teal’c said. “This could be exploited.”
Nodding, the Colonel watched the guard with eyes narrowed in thought.
“Goa’uld,” Sam said, as the idea began to form, still drifting and shadowy but coming clearer.
“What about them, besides the ‘they suck’?” O’Neill asked, without shifting his attention.
Again, Sam groped in her mind, waiting for the picture, the relationships to coalesce a little. After a moment, she gave it a shot. “The Jaffa and Sebek were obviously affected.”
“It must have been a severe disruption for the Goa’uld to risk leaving his host,” Teal’c added.
“Right, so the host is affected, too, like we all were.”
“Which means?” O’Neill made a ‘move along’ gesture with his good hand. Outside the cell, the Jaffa paused to gaze impassively at them, and the Colonel smiled tightly. “Still here. Thanks for checking.”
When the guard moved on again, Sam continued, “Well, there’s a common thread, isn’t there? We all experienced memories, or…well, something, anyway, that involved the Goa’uld. Jolinar, Sebek, Kanan. Why?” He gave her a ‘you’re asking me?’ face, and she had to smile a little. “The point is, there’s something, I don’t know, directed about this disturbance. It’s not just the fumes or the gravity or the fact that we haven’t eaten in two days.”
“And the effects are alleviated now,” Teal’c said.
“Right. So it’s got to do with the mine. With what’s behind that door.”
“That door Daniel is going to be opening any minute now.” The Colonel looked at her steadily, and Sam shook her head.
“If it were so easy, he’d already have done it.”
“Unless Daniel Jackson was stalling for time,” Teal’c said.
“Oh, he wasn’t stalling,” the Colonel said. “Lots of writing, nifty puzzle. Daniel was doing his best. You know it, I know it.” He leaned forward to look into the hallway again before letting his head fall back against the wall. “But Daniel figures everything out, eventually.”
Sam pictured Daniel’s hands, thought of him pressing the IDC and stepping through the Stargate and into the ‘gate room, and of the look of relief that would be on the General’s face right before Sebek snapped his neck. Goosebumps rose on her arms; she shivered and rubbed her bare skin, pushing away the feeling. “If he can’t get into the mine, he still has one place he can go,” she said softly. “One code he does know.”
The Colonel turned his gaze toward the back wall, so she couldn’t see his face. After a long moment, he said, “We can’t let it get that far.”
Sam’s heart thudded in her chest. She’d thought about it before— after Jolinar’s death years ago, and again when the Colonel had been implanted by Hathor. She’d imagined the moment when she would have to kill her friends— quickly, to spare them the unending torture of possession by a Goa’uld. Her hands had been covered in the blood of friends before, but never like this. A part of her had believed it would never happen.
But they’d been lucky, and Daniel’s luck had apparently run out. After all his narrow escapes, all the times he’d been close to death and survived or come back from things even worse than death— to die at the hands of his friends…
Sam looked at the Colonel’s face, the thin line of his lips and the set of his jaw, and knew she would not be the one to deliver the fatal wound. She would bear the same guilt, though. There was no relief in it, for her.
“I do not believe Sebek wishes to separate himself from the technology inside the vault,” Teal’c said. “He could easily have left this world in the hands of his First Prime, but he has not.”
“No.” The Colonel’s fingers twitched in his lap. “He’s staying right here. Where we can get our hands on him.”
Sam flinched at the explicit reminder.
“We are vastly outnumbered. We will not be able to get close to him.” Teal’c’s voice was low and even, but Sam knew it was not that easy.
“We’ve been outnumbered since this started,” O’Neill said. “Nothing’s different now.”
“He may move on to someone else,” Sam suggested, a little desperate. The Colonel didn’t look at her.
Teal’c’s slight hesitation was more telling than the quietness of his voice. “And if he does, he will leave this host in the same condition as his previous host.”
“There’s always a chance, Teal’c,” she snapped. He inclined his head, deferring the argument. There was no point, and she was ashamed of herself the moment he looked away. “Teal’c,” she began, but just then the guard wheeled around in front of the door as another joined them.
“Move to the rear,” one of the Jaffa ordered, as he maneuvered into their space, holding a staff weapon on them. The end of the weapon bumped against the side wall. Slowly, Sam got to her feet and backed away, hands half-raised.
A young boy came stumbling into the cell, prodded along at the end of a staff weapon. His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes hung from his body like tatters from a scarecrow. Sam frowned; the bones of his wrists jutted out at sharp angles, and he looked as though he had not eaten well in a long time. One of the Jaffa shoved him hard enough to knock him down, and next to her, the Colonel tensed. He got up and took one step forward. “Leave the kid alone.”
“Mind your business, Tauri,” the Jaffa snarled, and raised the staff weapon a little higher, right to chest-level. The Colonel held up one hand, a gesture of understanding, but he was still rigid with anger. They watched as the guards threw the boy down against the wall, then backed away. “Do not speak to him,” the Jaffa ordered them. “He is none of your concern.”
“Right,” the Colonel said, and Sam knew without looking at him that he had no intention of following that command.
She didn’t, either.
It took a few minutes for the guard to resume his normal patrols, back and forth at five times the regular rate. As soon as it happened, Jack dropped to one knee and edged closer to the boy, who was curled against the wall, his head lowered onto his grubby arms.
“Hey,” O’Neill whispered. “Kid. We’re not going to hurt you.”
Refusing to look up, the boy shrank away as though he could dissolve into the brick.
“Sir. He has no reason to trust us.”
“Perceptive,” he replied. She gave him a look that should have withered his sarcasm, but she was off her game and the Colonel was focused on the boy.
“We are prisoners,” Teal’c said, “like you.”
The boy lifted his head and fixed Teal’c with a startling blue gaze full of hate. “You’re nothing like me.” He looked from Teal’c to the Colonel to Sam, but his expression never changed. No curiosity, no softness; just a blazing anger. “You want to trick me.” His eyes darted toward the shadow of the passing guard. “I’m not stupid, and I don’t have anything,” he protested, his voice cracking. He pressed his lips into a thin line.
Crouching next to the Colonel, Teal’c answered, “We want nothing from you.”
“You always want something,” the boy growled. “Jaffa take.”
“Not all Jaffa.”
The boy made a noise of disgust. He glared at the tattoo on Teal’c’s forehead, gathered a mouthful of spit and aimed it at Teal’c’s face.
“Hey!” the Colonel snapped. The boy’s head whipped around, and he stared at the Colonel without remorse, then looked away again.
Teal’c rose and wiped the spittle from his forehead with the back of his hand. He stared at it for a long moment, then said finally, “Do not admonish him, O’Neill. There are many who have the right to do as he has done.”
Sam shook her head wearily. “Teal’c, you can’t take the blame for all Jaffa everywhere in the galaxy.” She turned to the boy, whose brow was furrowed, for once something other than anger showing in his eyes. “We don’t want to trick you. And we don’t want to hurt you. We want to get out of here, just like you do. And Teal’c isn’t what you think.”
His eyes shifting from her to the Colonel to Teal’c, the boy leaned forward a little. “Teal’c?” he asked. His eyes narrowed to suspicious slits again.
“Yes,” Teal’c confirmed.
The Colonel hooked his thumb in Teal’c’s direction. “You know him?”
“Shol’va,” he answered, without the edge of derision the word usually carried. He shifted his gaze to O’Neill. “You’re SG-1, aren’t you?”
The Colonel let a thin smile warm his face a little. “Our reputation precedes us. I’m Jack. That’s Carter.”
“Where’s the other one?”
The smile faded. “He’s in the mine, with Sebek.”
For a moment the kid’s gaunt face held no expression at all, but slowly his mouth hardened and the anger was back. “He lied,” he said, finally, through clenched teeth.
“Who lied?” Sam asked.
“If you’re here, I should be free. He promised.”
“Sebek?”
He turned his blazing eyes on her. “My father.”
O’Neill raised an eyebrow in Sam’s direction. She stared at the kid as it all began to make sense— lies, truths, bits of information, all coalescing.
“You are the son of Aris Boch,” Teal’c stated, confirming out loud what Sam was thinking.
Other than dropping his head to his knees again, the boy made no reply.
“Wait a minute,” the Colonel objected. “The Tok’ra said he didn’t have a son.”
Sam could remember quite vividly the Colonel’s account of the conversation he’d had with the rescued Tok’ra and his grudging respect for Aris’s powers of manipulation. Not that it had worked on them at the time, but Aris was good at spinning the occasional compelling yarn to get what he wanted.
“They lied,” Aris’s son answered, his voice muffled by his arms. “Everybody lies.”
It took the President half an hour to call Hammond back on the red phone, and when he did, he seemed entirely too patient. Too used to hearing that a member of SG-1 was missing; too confident things would work out fine. Hammond knew it wasn’t intentional. The man had been nothing but supportive of the program over the last years of his presidency. But that was coming to an end now, and SG-1 was the team with more than their share of close calls. If they weren’t so good at getting themselves out of the enormous trouble they got into, the President might have called back in five minutes. It didn’t really matter. Hammond already had his plan in place. Briefing the President was the smallest part of it.
Around three hours after SG-1’s report-back time had come and gone, Hammond had sent SG teams 14 and 17 after them, loaded to the gills with protective gear and heavily armed. He’d looked straight into Major Harper’s eyes and told him, “Find them, Major,” and Harper had nodded and stepped through the ‘gate as though he had every confidence in the world that he could carry out those orders. There was no other way to go about it, or so Hammond had always believed. Fake it until you make it, Jack O’Neill would have said.
Harper’s recon squad was now just a shade over two minutes late.
Hammond had a comfortable chair for occasions just like this one, but he never actually slept in it. It was as if he had an innate ability that enabled him to keep his head on straight through the long hours, no matter how many days those hours stretched into. The coffee helped, too, Air Force dark, strong enough to hold the spoon upright when he stirred in his sugar. He pored over files, worked on overdue performance evaluations for his direct reports, went over inventory and requisition forms, cracked open budget files. Anything to keep him from composing letters of condolence in the back of his brain, tiny squares of white paper that loomed larger as the hours went on and were filled with lines of imaginary black scrawl. Last words, about the fallen. He hated everything about condolence letters, even the taste of the glue on the envelope flaps. The visceral memory plagued him.
Harriman didn’t need to page him when the gate activated. He was out the door and down the stairs, into the control room even before Harriman could get to the com. SG-14 straggled down the ramp after SG-17, dragging a handcuffed Relosian with them, his eyes as big around as the ‘gate. No matter the reason they’d brought him back to Earth, this couldn’t be a good sign.
Hammond met Major Harper at the end of the ramp, looked into his eyes again, and saw nothing but bone-deep exhaustion and disappointment. The Relosian looked like he might dart for cover any moment, but one of Harper’s men had a big hand on his shoulder, anchoring him to the spot.
“Report, Major,” Hammond ordered.
Harper threw off the slump of weariness in his shoulders, drawing himself to attention. “Sir, we’ve been over every inch of that village. There’s no sign SG-1 is still in the vicinity. They left behind some of their equipment, including some books and the laptop Dr. Jackson was using for the negotiations.”
“You’ve searched the quadrant nearest the ‘gate?”
“Yes, sir.” Harper glanced at his men, then said, “Sir, we double-timed it over that entire area. There’s nothing there. This one, though, tried to sell us a load of bull about how there were evil demons in the woods that lure in travelers and eat them. Not what I’d call a sophisticated cover story.” He gestured toward the native, who flinched.
“Have you managed to find out what he does actually know?” Hammond asked, looking not all that closely at the bruise on the young man’s cheek and the corresponding redness of Harper’s knuckles.
“We think he sold their whereabouts to someone, but he won’t tell us who, or what they wanted with SG-1. Maybe he doesn’t know, but we haven’t had enough time yet to find that out.”
“Did you capture him by force?” Hammond asked.
“No, sir. The Relosians seemed to want to cooperate, and their leaders looked pretty shocked that he might be in on this. They offered him up on a silver platter.”
“You’re certain they’re telling the truth?” Hammond had dealt with enough duplicitous offworld governments to know that the wide-eyed innocent ones were often the ones most likely to torture his people until they gave up their codes.
“Reasonably so, sir, yes.” Harper fished in his pocket and pulled out a handful of small objects. He let them tumble into Hammond’s palm.
“What are these?”
“These are what they were trying to give Dr. Jackson when he left in the middle of negotiations. They were concerned that we were backing out of the deal.”
Hammond sighed and handed the beans back to Harper. “Major, I’ll waive the debrief. Put together a comprehensive search of the planet using UAV and any other means you deem necessary. I’m sending SG-9 back to complete the negotiations.”
“Yes, sir,” Harper said. “Sir, time is of the essence. I don’t know what’s happened to them, but—”
Hammond stared hard at the Relosian, who stepped back a pace, only to run into his keeper. Allowing himself a bitter smile, Hammond was gratified to see he still had the power of intimidation. He turned to Harper. “Find out, Major. Use any approved methods at your disposal. We’ll send a coded message to the Tok’ra, to tell them we have a problem that requires their assistance, and request a meeting.”
“Yes, sir!” Harper turned and tilted his head to his lieutenant. Between them they pulled their reluctant captive off the ramp and headed toward the interrogation rooms.
When Hammond turned the corner toward the control room, he found his way blocked by Dr. Fraiser. “Doctor?” he said. “Something I can do for you?”
Janet smiled; she looked as wiped out as he felt. “I just thought it’d be best to be nearby, in case my staff were needed.”
“Wise thinking,” he said, glad as hell her staff weren’t needed. Yet.
“General, can I buy you a cup of coffee?” she asked.
He smiled at her. “No more coffee for me tonight. But I could do with some breakfast. Just as soon as I send this message to the Tok’ra.” He followed her into the corridor, still focused on the problem at hand.
No matter what they found on that planet, or what the Relosian prisoner coughed up, it likely wouldn’t lead directly to SG-1. He’d have to find another way, and the Tok’ra were going to help him find it, like it or not.