Teal’c noticed the lack of precautions as well. “Perhaps he is more concerned with security on his property and leaves policing the Stargate to the villagers.”
“Let’s hope,” Sam said. “I doubt we’ll be as lucky on the day of his party.”
She angled the drone into the low atmosphere where it would be less obvious from the ground and flew northwest. After a buffer space of fields and winding dirt roads the camera found a sprawling house near the rocky edge of the coast. It looked more like a museum than someone’s home, and a half dozen statues stood in a semi-circle at the front of the building, their carved faces looking out toward any visitors as they arrived. An al’kesh was parked behind the building on an inclined display, like a truck on sale at a used car dealership.
Standing behind her, Jack, Daniel, and Teal’c all examined the building. “Looks like the Goa’uld aren’t the only ones who like their palaces to be a little gaudy,” Jack said. “How many square feet you think that thing’s got?”
“I’m more concerned with the defenses,” Sam said. “If Wyrrick discovers who we really are, we don’t want to end up trapped in there.”
“I still don’t understand why we don’t just sweep in, blow out the doors, and take what we need.” The team all looked at him and he grimaced. “Wishful thinking. I’m the boss now, so of course I understand why we have to go the diplomatic, quiet route. But still… if I wasn’t here, I would definitely suggest ignoring the general’s orders and just taking what we need.”
Sam said, “We’ll take that under advisement, sir.”
“Just don’t let me find out if you have to take extreme measures. Deny, deny, deny.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, sir.”
The phone near the stairs began ringing, and Jack glanced over as a technician answered it. He listened for a moment, then handed the receiver to Jack.
“O’Neill.”
“Sir, Kali has requested a conversation. She said she’ll only speak with Captain Morello.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “I’ll track her down.” He hung up and looked at the team. “Looks like Captain Morello may have one-upped you in the negotiating world, Dr. Jackson. Kali is willing to talk.”
Daniel blinked behind his glasses. “Wow. That — that’s great.”
“Yeah. Any idea where the captain is right now?”
“She’s been researching Kali,” Daniel said. “She wanted to use some of my books so she’s probably in my office.”
“I’ll go grab her. Daniel, want to sit in?”
“Sure. It’s not every day we see a Goa’uld offering to help us out.”
Jack said, “Carter, keep up the recon. Let me know if you find anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack led Daniel to the elevators and rode up to Level 19. As expected, Morello was stationed behind Daniel’s desk with one book open in front of her and her body twisted so she could refer to something on the computer screen.
“Well, this looks familiar…”
Morello turned when she saw who had arrived. “General! Doctor! Um.” As she stood up she accidentally displaced one of her books and shot one hand out to grab it. Putting it on the table she checked to make sure it would stay, then straightened and smiled. “Sorry. Kind of messy.”
“You work with Daniel Jackson, you get used to messy,” Jack said. “Just got word from one of the guards watching Kali. She’s ready to talk.”
Morello blinked. “That’s fantastic! What did she say?”
“She hasn’t yet,” Daniel said. “She’s waiting to talk to you.”
“Me?”
“It was your idea,” Jack said.
Morello said, “Oh. Okay. Um. Yes.” She cleared her throat, looked back at her work. “I’ve been trying to find an angle, something that will further sway her if she needs more convincing. I’ve found a few things, so I’m — I’m confident.”
“Good,” Jack said. “Then so am I. Shall we?”
Jack noticed that Morello’s nerves only got worse as they walked to the holding cells. “No reason to be nervous,” he said. “There’s one person in that room with any power, and she’s a captain in the United States Air Force. The other one is a has-been trying to hold onto the last little bit of her power. She’s going to play games, she’s going to try and intimidate you. Don’t let her.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll try, sir.”
Jack nodded to the guard to open the door, then he walked into the observation room. Through the glass he saw Kali watching as Morello came in and took a seat across from her. The captain’s voice was calm when she spoke, but Jack could tell she was still quaking on the inside.
“I hear you wanted to speak with me.”
“You are foolish if you believe you can sway me with sentimentality,” Kali said. Again, her voice was strong and full of confidence, but Jack knew it was just a front. Morello had gotten to her. “Are your people still flailing about in an attempt to stop my vengeance?”
“We’re trying to stop your petty revenge, yes.”
Kali took a deep breath and slowly blinked. “I will not help you in this matter. But I will tell you this; I left my palace three hundred days ago. If I do nothing, the failsafe will be enacted and the plague will be released in four days’ time.”
Jack looked at Daniel. “Party’s in two days. Gives us plenty of time to get what we need and plug it in. If she’s telling the truth.”
Daniel nodded. “And that’s a big if.”
“Still, Sam has worked miracles in thirty seconds. If we give her forty-eight hours to figure out how the thing works, I have no doubt she’ll pull it off. It’s nice to have a little wiggle room.” He noticed Daniel’s pensive expression. “Right?”
“Right,” Daniel said. “If we can find the master switch, and if we can figure out where the signal is supposed to originate so we can cut it off at the source. There’s a chance success will mean cutting a genocide down into a mass murder.”
Jack hissed through his teeth and glared through the glass. “Right.”
“I suppose there is one good thing about knowing when the plague will be released. If the deadline is approaching and we’re still coming up empty, we can get Teal’c to safety and warn as many planets as we can that they should bury their Stargate. The Jaffa can protect themselves so that even if the failsafe is enacted the actual lives lost will be minimal.”
Jack said, “It would only take one.”
“Exactly.”
“Damn. Every time I start to get a little hope…”
Daniel looked at him. “Are you serious? This is huge, Jack. Morello got Kali to give us a timeline. She got a Goa’uld to tell us how much time was left on her master plan. That’s big.” He looked through the glass again. “I think Kali is just trying her best to save face by giving us as little as possible, but Morello got through to her. With time, I think she could break through.”
“Four days,” Jack said.
“Hopefully it’ll be enough.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Over the past twenty-eight hours, Wyrrick’s kitchen had become a battlefield. Vala and Tanis alternated tasks, moving between burners and iceboxes, mincing and dicing everything they could get a blade near. Vala swept up a handful of spices and moved to dump them into a pot, but Tanis stopped her and spoke to her in a low but firm voice. “Unless you’ve changed the plan to involve killing everyone at the party so we can take the time clearing this place out, I would suggest not combining tacyhek root with baccetel. That would be less appetizer and more poison.”
“Sorry we all can’t be the culinary geniuses like yourself.”
Tanis sighed and Vala felt a twinge of guilt. They’d been at each other’s throats more than usual since they started working on the feast. The downside of Vala’s plan to get them into the house meant they were actually responsible for the food prep. Tanis had enough rudimentary skills to pull it off, but Vala was just following directions as best she could and trying not
to set anything on fire. She knew the next day they would have to be on good terms, so to defuse the tension she wiped her hands on the apron and looked over her shoulder to make sure they were still alone.
“I’m going to take a quick peek around, see if I can get the lay of the land.”
“Fine.”
Vala left the kitchen before Tanis could snap at her again. Wyrrick had given them a small guest room near the kitchen, an attached cottage that was almost twice the size of their tel’tac. The downside to comfort was that the door had been locked from the outside overnight. “A precaution,” Wyrrick’s man had assured them. “We have many priceless artifacts here. It’s not that we don’t trust you, but…”
Certainly not, Vala had thought, but she noticed he hadn’t finished the sentence. Fortunately they had already scanned the building from their tel’tac, and Tanis still had the blueprints they’d gotten from Bellee. She plugged the two scans together and got an up-to-date view of what the house looked like. The treasures were represented by large but obscure blobs. From the scan she couldn’t tell which specific collection had once belonged to Kali, but she was confident that she would know it when she saw it.
The private residences, kitchen, and laundry, were all clustered in a separate hive of rooms connected to the main house by a grand central corridor. Vala checked to make sure Wyrrick or Athen weren’t lurking before she set out to explore. She had a menu question tucked away just in case she happened across either of them in her snooping.
A pair of double doors led from the private areas of the house to the public rooms, the places where the guests would soon be gathering. The main ballroom was enclosed by a curving hall from which all the collection rooms could be accessed. Currently the doors were all standing open so the decorators could prepare Wyrrick’s toys, and Vala paused to examine some of the fancier items. She saw items she recognized from Ba’al’s palaces, and she saw a multitude of antiques with the mark of Osiris and his queen. Every room she passed was a veritable fortune waiting to be made on the black market. Nothing she saw bore the mark of Kali, however, and she forced herself to keep moving.
In the ballroom she could see the central island where musicians and food stations would be set up. There was room for five hundred guests, perhaps more, and she could just imagine the swarm of attendees mingling with the wait staff she and Tanis were going to hire from the local populace. They just had to be sure to hire people who wouldn’t think it unusual when the head waitress commandeered their carts and covered trays. The sheer number of people should keep her activities under the radar.
The stairs were blocked by a tri-fold gate that prevented anyone from going up to the second level. Vala slowed to look up at the landing and idly wondered what could possibly be worth segregating when all the treasures were on the ground floor.
She was about to admit defeat and make another round when she reached the final room on the circuit. She stopped in the doorway and stared, jaw dropping as she gazed at the riches of Kali. She had a moment of nostalgic sadness; she despised Qetesh, but after being freed she had spent several glorious months impersonating her former tormentor and living the life of luxury in temples on a half dozen scattered worlds. There were planets she could have visited that very evening where the people would bow down to her as their god. Word of deicide didn’t exactly travel quickly, contrary to what some might believe, and the backwater worlds were slow to believe their god was dead when she was little more than a vague idea in the first place.
But being revered as a god and actually walking back into a golden palace replete with wealth were two very different things. Even her most modest sanctuaries would have been picked clean by now, her glorious and magnificent toys had all been taken away from her and she’d gotten nothing in return. But Kali’s loss could be her gain. Even the light fixtures, golden cylinders with hieroglyphics shapes carved to let the light through, were magnificent. They could sell those without blinking on any of a dozen worlds. Tapestries would be a bit more difficult to unload without provenance, but in the current climate, who was going to worry about something like that? These weren’t just any goods. They were spoils of war. People would want mementos and damn the cost.
Vala didn’t realize how deep into the room she was until Wyrrick spoke and broke the spell.
“I assure you, no one will be eating in here.”
Vala spun to see him standing in the doorway, blocking her exit with his bulk. His arms were crossed and, despite his neutral expression, she could tell he was leaning closer to amusement than anger. Her life had depended on navigating such thin lines before, and she was confident with her ability to read them. She crossed her arms behind her back, smiled, and affected a nervous sway when she moved toward him.
“Master Wyrrick! I thought you would be so busy with… I mean, this place has been such a madhouse, and all these treasures…” She hunched her shoulders and looked at him through her eyelashes, aiming for defenseless ingénue. If it worked, she would see it around his eyes and in a softening of his lips. “I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to appreciate them during the party, so I thought… what’s the harm in taking a quick peek now?”
The lines on either side of his mouth softened. Vala resisted the urge to smile at her victory.
“I could have you arrested on suspicion, you realize.”
Vala widened her eyes. “No! Please, you wouldn’t! Even if they merely held me until the party was over, Madame Ai would certainly have my job for leaving her in the lurch. Please, I promise, I won’t overstep my boundaries again!”
Wyrrick finally allowed himself a full smile. “Relax. I don’t blame you for being curious. In fact, it would have been suspicious if you weren’t tempted to have a look around. Someone who resisted such an urge would make me think they were overcompensating. Make me wonder why they were trying so hard to act unimpressed. So you can relax. You’ve set my mind at ease.”
“Phew!” Vala said, masking her authentic relief with an overacted swipe at her brow. “Madame Ai only let me steal away from the kitchen if I promised to tell her what I saw.” She gestured at the room they were in. “Where did all this come from, if I may ask?”
“Ah, this room.” Wyrrick stepped inside, thus giving her an escape route. The knot of tension in her chest relaxed and Vala allowed herself to follow Wyrrick further into the room. There was a dialing pedestal nearby and she leaned against it, feigning nonchalance as Wyrrick gestured at the treasures. “These are the pickings from the realm of the once-great Kali.”
“Kali! I think I know of her. She was an enemy of Lord Yu.” And of Qetesh, but she didn’t include that little tidbit of history. “Did she survive the downfall of the Goa’uld?”
Wyrrick shrugged. “She was an ally of Anubis. When he fell, the System Lords who sided with him fell. Not that many System Lords are welcome anywhere these days. Their treasures, however, are always welcome…”
Vala laughed. “Too true! Too true. Um…” She cleared her throat and looked down at the object she was resting against. It was a multifaceted pedestal with a control panel on one side and a cluster of Stargate glyphs in the center. “This, for instance. This is the most gorgeous dialer I’ve ever seen!”
“That’s not actually a dialer,” Wyrrick said. “I’m not sure what it does. I’ve heard rumors, of course.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Would you like to hear one?”
Vala raised her eyebrows. “Of course! I adore rumors.”
“I hear it controls a doomsday device, one which any day now will wipe out every Jaffa in the galaxy. Without this to stop it, the plague will be unleashed throughout the Stargate system.”
“Really!” Vala gazed wide-eyed at the pedestal. “And to think, the one thing that could save an entire race is sitting right in this room. That’s a lot of power to wield, Mr. Wyrrick.”
“It’s only power if I intend to do something with it.”
“You’re not?”
Wyrrick sai
d, “For hundreds of years, the Jaffa laid waste to this galaxy. They stormed through the Stargate in their fright masks, staff weapons ablaze, and dragged children away from parents, left people crippled and villages decimated in their wake. The Jaffa are as much a pestilence as the Goa’uld, and I view this plague as a great flood coming forth across every planet in the Stargate system… the Goa’uld may be gone, but we won’t be cleansed until their foot soldiers have followed them into the grave.”
“A bit odd to invite them to your party in that case, isn’t it?”
Wyrrick smiled. “The art of scheming did not die with the Goa’uld, my dear. All will become clear soon enough.”
Something in his smile made Vala sick to her stomach. She swallowed the lump in her throat and resisted the urge to cringe away from Wyrrick when he touched her elbow.
“Shall we continue? There are a lot of treasures to explore.”
“Yes, of course.”
Wyrrick walked past her to the door, but Vala lingered by the pedestal a moment longer. Again with a rumor about a plague that threatened the Jaffa. She still didn’t quite believe the plague was real, but if it was… she was standing next to the means with which to stop it. The Jaffa had done unspeakable evil through the galaxy, without question. But she also knew they rarely had a choice in the matter. Obey your god or die. Obey your god or your family will be exiled and left to starve. The Jaffa were victims of the Goa’uld as much as any other race. More so, perhaps.
She reached out and brushed her fingers over the control panel and thought of how many people would move the heavens and its stars just to know where it was: altruists, do-gooders, crusaders for right. Vala was quite sure she didn’t know anyone like that and, if she did, they would go out of their way to squash her like a bug. She and Tanis had sacrificed too much already to risk everything on a good deed. Her altruism would begin just as soon as the treasure was in her hands.
SG1-24 Two Roads Page 20
