SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne

by Savile, Steven

  Daniel looked wounded but he didn’t say anything. Teal’c on the other hand looked at O’Neill with no small amount of consternation. “Am I to remain behind, O’Neill?”

  “There’s a good boy,” O’Neill said.

  “These strangers have given us no reason to trust them, O’Neill. I advise proceeding with caution.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of doing it any other way, my friend.”

  O’Neill left with Dragul and Jahamat, leaving the rest of them in a curious sort of limbo between honored guests and prisoners. They were pushed and prodded toward one of the ice structures. It had been stripped of any creature comforts it might once have had. Five thick furs lay on blocks of ice to make beds and a small trough had been cut into the ground to form a latrine. It was dark but surprisingly warm inside, the ice walls somehow absorbing the heat of the sun and holding on to it without melting. No one spoke for the longest time, then Teal’c broke the silence: “There is much I do not understand here, Major Carter. Not least of which is the power the Mujina seems to wield over all that look upon it.”

  “Right there with you, Teal’c.”

  “Did you perhaps note the reaction of our guards to the creature?”

  “If you mean the hunger that burned in their eyes, I did, yes.”

  “Indeed. It would seem that the creature’s influence is extending beyond direct line of sight.”

  “You could be right.” Sam remembered the way the men had stared at the helmet’s dark visor. They hadn’t been able to see through it but that no longer seemed to matter, they responded to the creature’s presence just the same.

  “Couldn’t we use it to our advantage?” Daniel’s voice sounded curiously strained in the dark. Sam wondered for a moment if it even was his voice and not some filtered need picked up on by the Mujina.

  “Is this your idea of staying out of trouble?” she asked, only half-joking. Something about the notion of using the Mujina’s gift disturbed her on a primal level.

  “I’m not talking about raising an army and fighting our way out, Sam,” Daniel said. “I was thinking more like having our charming new companion befriend one of the guards. Every good prison break movie seems to have a man on the inside. Maybe we can use him to smuggle in an ice pick or something?”

  “Daniel Jackson’s suggestion is not without merit,” Teal’c agreed. “The creature does possess a curious gift for bonding with humans.”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Daniel pressed. She heard him move in the darkness.

  Sam wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a recipe for disaster just waiting to be unleashed.

  “Sam?”

  “I don’t know, Daniel. There was something about the way it got inside my head that makes me reluctant to turn the Mujina loose.”

  “But — ”

  “I can see the advantages. I honestly can. But I don’t know, I can’t help thinking it would be like Pandora’s Box. Once it’s out there, there’s no shutting the lid and I’m not quite sure I’m ready to deal with the consequences of that just yet.”

  “You all talk about me as though my mind is brittle and I am incapable of understanding what it is you are saying. I am not yours to use once and destroy.” It was the first time the creature had spoken directly, and it was disconcerting to realize its level of understanding. It was more than a mimic. That changed things for Sam. “I know what you need and how desperate you are for desires you dare not voice, Major Carter. I know you better than you know yourself. There is love and fear in you, in equal amounts, though you never allow either to win. Do not for a minute think I know the guard outside any less intimately, nor that he knows his own desires any more clearly than you do. Few people know the secret yearnings of their hearts, and so often they are different to the desires of the mind. If I choose to use my gift in this situation it will be because I judge it necessary to save myself. Do you understand?”

  She did. “But how come I hear you now, not the voice of my mother?”

  “It is the darkness. For the moment it dulls the yearning because you cannot see her face in mine. Tomorrow it may not be so. It is difficult to tell, each mind succumbs at a different rate depending upon the force of the need driving it. You have a strong mind but you possess an equally strong need. I do not have the answer for you, but I will tell you this, I have seen the worlds inside your minds, all of them, and I would walk them all. I will not die here.”

  Something moved in the darkness. “Good for you,” a disembodied voice rasped. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Those three words dripped with bitterness.

  She hadn’t seen anyone else in that brief moment when the light of outside had streamed into the prison — and she was under no illusion, that was exactly where they were. “Who’s there?”

  The only answer was a short bray of coughing. The sound was wet and thick with phlegm. She didn’t need to be a doctor to know whoever shared the jail with them wasn’t faring well. When the coughing finally stopped the prisoner said, “I said the same thing when they threw me in here a month ago. Now, I don’t know, maybe I will die here,” he broke off as another coughing fit wracked his body. “It’s the blood. It is always about the blood.”

  “What do you mean?” Daniel asked, before Sam could.

  She moved toward the corner where the prisoner huddled up against the ice wall. “My blood is impure. I am Kelani, not Corvani.”

  “I don’t understand,” Daniel said. Sam noticed the shift in his tone that always accompanied his curiosity being piqued. She thought back to O’Neill’s warning. Did befriending an impure-blooded prisoner count as getting into trouble? She suspected it did. But she knew Daniel well enough to know he could never do anything else. His humanity burned brightest in dark places like this. It always had.

  “Don’t ever tell them that, not ever,” the prisoner rasped, his voice suddenly intense, strong. “Because they’ll know immediately that you aren’t one of us. They already know you aren’t one of them, and on Kumara it is always a case of them or us. That’s how the world turns. You might just as well say you don’t know the difference between Banak and Krace. And don’t tell me you don’t. I don’t want to know. Ignorance marks you as an outsider. Being something else, well that ain’t going to bode well for you, man. Because if you aren’t from here it means you are from somewhere else, and Corvus Keen is going want to know where, exactly, and more importantly, how he can get there.”

  “I understand,” Daniel said.

  “What of the blood?” Teal’c asked.

  “I am Kelani.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I am a sub-species, considered less than human, if the great Corvus Keen is to be believed.”

  “Ah.”

  “Such is Kumaran culture. My people are to blame for all the ills of the world simply because we are different. We are taught that different is wrong. They spray painted that slogan across my mother’s house when I was barely knee-high. Different is wrong. It is burned in my soul.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “You have no reason to be. It was not your doing, was it?”

  “No, but still, difference should be celebrated,” Daniel said. “Difference is what makes us special.”

  “That is what I believe, but the moment someone like me dares speak out against the norm, then we become a problem. Keen only has one way of dealing with problems: he removes them. That is why we are here in this place. Out of sight out of mind. We are good enough to toil away unseen, but heaven help us if we dance to the wrong tune. It’s funny,” the prisoner went on, the quality of his voice changing in the darkness as the bitterness faded into a more amused cynicism, “he’s got us out here looking for his holy grail, proof that the Corvani are superior. We are out here looking for the evidence to prove once and for all that the Kelani are inferior. You have to laugh, how many people would willingly search for the means of their own subjugation? It’s ironic if
nothing else, and sums up the arrogance of the man.”

  There was something chillingly familiar about the scenario the unseen prisoner presented, a supposedly ‘lesser’ species being beaten down by a so-called master race, being mocked for their difference, and then finally turned into prisoners and being made to disappear. It made Sam’s blood run cold. If she could draw the parallels she had no doubt Daniel could, just as easily.

  “Corvus?” Daniel mused, “Is that an affectation or is it his name? Corvus, Corvani? It seems like a title, Emperor? God-King?”

  “He took the name himself, another mark of his arrogance if you ask me. He claims it marks him as a man of the people, but really it does nothing more than serve to divide the two breeds, those of pure blood who bear his name, and the rest of us who are marked as less than human.”

  She knew Daniel well enough to realize he was already taking on this injustice as his own, and once it became personal there was no way they were going to be able to convince him it wasn’t their fight — but it really wasn’t. It wasn’t their place to enforce their way of life on alien worlds; they weren’t leaping about in space and time to put right what once went wrong, they weren’t offering the American Dream to the cultures they encountered. It was difficult not to get involved sometimes, especially when things seemed so familiar — and so wrong — but it really wasn’t their place to meddle.

  But, with all that said, she heard a little Jiminy Cricket speaking with Daniel’s voice in her head, how can we not? How can we simply stand by and watch? How can we simply walk away?

  Knowing what she knew, it was difficult to argue against it. But societies had to be allowed to develop at their own pace, and that meant being left to make their own mistakes, and more importantly, to solve them.

  Even if that means genocide?

  That voice whispered again, and this time she realized it wasn’t Daniel’s at all, it was the Mujina toying with her. The way in which it could so effectively manipulate the more emotive heartstrings was terrifying. A few well-chosen words whispered into the deep-rooted core of her self, and all reason fled. Sam felt the cold seething anger it had intended to stir and swallowed it down. Every new hour spent in the creature’s presence went a little further toward explaining what the Tok’ra meant when they called the Mujina a weapon.

  “I can help you.” She heard the words, but didn’t know whether they belonged to the prisoner, or were another of the Mujina’s promises. She suspected the latter, but before she could say anything there was a harsh grating sound followed by a chink of light as the door opened. She saw O’Neill’s silhouette back-lit by the sun. “All right, ladies and gentlemen,” the colonel clapped his hands, “out you come. Chop chop.”

  “Don’t leave me!” The prisoner came scrabbling forward into the triangle of light cast on the frozen ground. He was a miserable wretch. The skin hung slackly about his face, leaving dark hollows where his eyes were hidden, barely more than slits, and sunken cheeks that elongated his face into a death mask. He was a thing of skin and bone, brittle and frail and too readily broken.

  When he looked up at her Sam felt something inside break. Everything he had claimed came to life in the ruin of his body and she knew she wasn’t seeing him through the filter of the Mujina’s perceptions. The bones of his skull pressed out through his skin while every rib, every vertebrae, and every tiny bone between stood out starkly against bare leathery skin. She had only seen this kind of intimate death once before in her life, and that was in the pictures of the death camps, the gaunt look of surrender written all over the faces of the damned. And here it was now, in front of her, alive and begging for help. She was looking at a man very slowly and very deliberately being starved to death. And why?

  Because his blood was different, she heard the Mujina whisper inside her head, and this time she allowed its indignation to inflame her.

  “I can help you,” the creature said again, and this time Sam believed it because she needed to.

  She looked at every face in the cramped room and saw the same visceral response to the creature’s promise echoed in the hope behind their eyes. Those four words had touched them all. They believed.

  She stepped forward, into the light.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Fisher King

  Jack O’Neill caught Carter before she could get too close to the creature. He couldn’t explain why he had done it beyond the fact that he knew he had to. He had seen her step into the triangle of light, and whether it was a trick of the light or the truth of his own eyes, a peculiar dullness appeared to take the luster from her eyes. It was unnerving and it was all the warning he got.

  Jack had heard the Mujina’s promise and knew there was more to it than the words. Something about the sentence jarred inside him and instead of being seductive it sounded repulsive. He always had been a contrary bastard, so it didn’t surprise him that the siren’s promise fell on deaf ears.

  O’Neill matched Carter step for step, and as she began to lower herself he caught her arm and pulled her toward him. For the echoing silence between heartbeats it became a clinch. Then he pushed her away, toward the door.

  “Come on, Major, we need to talk.”

  “I don’t…” Carter mumbled. Then, as quickly as it had come over her, the fugue state seemed to lift and she said, “Sir.”

  “Outside, Major. Now. You too, Daniel, Teal’c.” The Mujina made to follow them but Jack stopped it. “Not you. You stay here where you can’t get into any trouble. Do we understand each other?”

  “I mean you no harm, O’Neill,” the creature said. He could feel it trying again with its saccharine tone and half-truths.

  “Of course you don’t.” Jack bolted the door behind him. “But that’s half the problem.”

  He ratcheted the final bolt home and turned his back on the lonely mewling of the creature. It would survive. That was what it did.

  Somewhere in the ice city a bugle sounded. It was an incongruous sound, a fanfare for the coming dusk.

  “All right, people,” Jack said. “I had an interesting chat with our host. Seems we’ve walked into the middle of what amounts to a civil war — but still we have one priority here, getting home. Everything else is window dressing.”

  “They’re being segregated, tortured and murdered because of their blood, Jack. That’s a little more than window dressing,” Daniel said. “I’m sick of hearing the company line: it’s not our place to intervene, we aren’t here to meddle, everything’s changed and nothing has changed. People are dying, Jack, and I don’t know how many or why, but something about the whole thing sets my skin crawling.”

  “Teal’c?”

  “I do not have enough knowledge of the situation to offer a considered opinion, O’Neill.”

  “Finally. Thank you, Teal’c. That’s exactly my point. We don’t know enough to make a decision on what side of the fence we fall. Who’s to say we aren’t being led a merry dance by the monsters of the piece? Right now we’re fact finding, and the first fact we need to find out is where the hell we are.”

  “Ah, I think the planet’s called Kumara by the locals,” Daniel offered.

  “Great. Teal’c, ring any bells?”

  The big man shook his head. “I do not believe so. Once, perhaps, before I took the ritual of prim’tah and was apprenticed to Bra’tac, but the memory may not be my own so I cannot say with any certainty, O’Neill. One must surely question what is real and what the creature has manipulated. Though, I confess, I do not know why you would wish to know if I have ever rung a bell in this situation.”

  “Ah, not literal, a metaphorical bell, my friend, but thanks, you answered my question.”

  “I have never encountered a metaphorical bell, O’Neill. I can state with certainty that I have not rung one.”

  Sometimes there was a level of absurdity that accompanied a conversation with his team that beggared belief, but for all that he wouldn’t change any one of them. Not now, not ever. Not willingly. T
hey were his people. He trusted them with his life as readily as they trusted him. “So the mission’s the same: we still need to identify the glyph that corresponds to Kumara on the Stargate.”

  The truth was the last half an hour had shaken him, but he wasn’t about to let on. As far as he could tell, these people were out here looking for proof that, way back when, evolution had diverged, just as it had on earth with Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens. Only here, Neanderthal man had neither died out nor been assimilated into the second species, but rather co-existed.

  He’d seen the same rationale applied to other races back home, seen the injustices of racism and prejudice first hand. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  They were here. They had to get home. The equation really was that simple. His responsibility was to his team, to the SGC, and to Earth, not to faceless thousands on an alien world. It was tough, but so was the damned universe.

  And, hell, who knew how this was going to play out? Maybe the good guys — whoever they were — would win out in the end?

  It didn’t have to be the case of one species exterminating the other.

  Unless…

  Even from the little Jahamat had told him he knew it was only going to end one way if they discovered the Stargate. If ever there was proof to be had, the gate was it. The idea that these Corvani might have traveled the stars to arrive on this ice cube could only serve to reinforce the whole Master Race bullshit. So he’d lied to Jahamat when evasion wasn’t enough to side-step the issue of where they’d come from. The man was no fool, but O’Neill knew he couldn’t let them find the Stargate. Some things were better left hidden.

  Outside, the bugle sounded again.