Teal’c had stood side by side with Jubal Kane and watched the engine slide into the wall of flame only for the carriages behind it to jack-knife as the full horror of the crash unfolded. Now they walked toward the little man who had caused so much devastation. Jachin looked inordinately pleased with himself as he dusted his hands off. “Told you,” he said.
“Excessive, don’t you think?” Jubal frowned down at the ruined train as the shocked and wounded tried to claw their way out of the wreckage.
“Is it stopped or is it stopped?”
“It’s stopped.”
“Which is exactly what you asked for. The rest, as they say, is just a bonus.”
Jubal stared at the man. “The rest is not a bonus, the rest is a lot of wasted humanity. Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you just make me seethe.”
Jubal had sixty-eight guns with him. It was all the ghetto could muster — all that were willing to throw their lot in with him and make a stand against Keen. It was hardly enough to take on an army, but sixty-eight guns were enough to sound out one hell of a battle cry. They would shake Corvus Keen’s world to its rotten foundations before they were through.
“Who wants to stay forever young?” Jubal Kane said.
Teal’c believed he was talking to himself so did not answer. He stared at the wreckage, horrified by the senseless destruction and the unnecessary loss of life. He clenched his fist, needing the sting of pain as his nails dug into his palm to stop himself from lashing out at the idiocy of Jachin. Surely this was every bit as evil as anything perpetrated by the so-called enemy. How could it be anything less as far as the dead on the train were concerned?
“Come on, my friend, tonight we fight, tomorrow we break fast with hell’s demons.”
“I believe I have lost my appetite,” Teal’c said.
Jubal Kane laughed. “You know, the more I get to know you, big man, the more I like you.”
And the rain came down. Teal’c savored the cold on his upturned face. He could not dwell upon the tragedy of the prisoners. He had to set about the business of saving his friends.
The train had at least twenty Raven Guard on it that needed to be neutralized. Jubal gave the signal and his men streamed down from their hiding places along the embankment and fell upon the dazed guards as they stumbled along the side of the train, trying to work out what had happened and to stop the Kelani prisoners from escaping. Gunshots rang out brutally in the night. That was the signal chaos had been waiting for.
Teal’c ran from carriage to twisted carriage looking for any sign of his friends. Bodies lay broken and every bit as ruined as the wooden timber frames of the wagons. People crawled about on their hands and knees, moaning and groaning as they tried to drag themselves away from the wreckage toward the safety of the grass verge. The rain turned the dirt into sucking mud, making everything much more of a trial as people slipped and slithered and slid and fell, barely able to pick themselves up again. In the confusion it was impossible to tell friend from foe. The Raven Guard had lost their guns in the hysteria after the crash and panicked under the onslaught. Now, blinded in the rain and the red glare of the burning truck, they were crawling about, every bit as dazed and confused as their prisoners.
Teal’c stood over a wounded man who had fallen face first and was sucking up mud and rain with every breath he took. He would have helped him, only he recognized the man as one of the two who had come looking for him at Kiah’s house just before it had been set aflame.
“Were you the one who hit the blind woman?” he asked, kneeling down close enough that the struggling man might hear. He need not have worried. The man heard all right.
The fool tried to nod again, lying through his teeth to save his own skin. “It was Gant. He made me do it. I tried to stop him. You have to believe me.”
“I do not have to believe you at all,” Teal’c said. “But it is not my place to believe or disbelieve, neither is it up to me to dispense punishment. Jubal Kane,” he called, his voice rising above the agony of the wounded and the anger of the wreckage.
Kane turned to see who called his name.
With his free hand, Teal’c gestured for the ghetto warrior to come. “This is one of the men who burned your mother’s house.”
“No, no, please, no…” The guard struggled to rise.
“Shut up!” Jubal Kane snapped. And to Teal’c, “How can you be sure?”
“He is one of the two I saw leaving after she sheltered me from their search earlier in the day.”
“One of the ones that beat her?”
Teal’c nodded.
Without a second thought Jubal Kane stepped in and snapped the man’s neck in single savage motion. The brutality of it shocked the Jaffa. “That is the justice of the ghetto,” Jubal Kane said, as though intoning judgment on the damned. He turned his back and walked away in search of another Raven Guard to put down. Teal’c did not need to be able to read his mind to know what he was thinking: the second man who had tried to murder his mother could be among them. There was no mercy in the man’s face.
Teal’c found Carter first. She was sitting with her back against the underside of the train carriage. The wheels had long since stopped spinning but they were still hot enough for the rain to steam as it hit the metal. She had her arms up around the long axel and appeared to be using it to brace her back. Her face was covered with blood that streaked in tears of rain, like a fury torn from the stuff of nightmare and given flesh. She smiled up at him through the bloody tears as he hunkered down beside her. “It’s good to see you, Teal’c.”
“It is good to see you, too, Major Carter. Are you well?”
She saw his concern and touched her cheek. Her fingers came away wet with blood. “This? It’s not mine. I’m fine,” she assured him. “Starving but fine. Honestly.”
“That is good.”
She shook her head. “It’s horrible, Teal’c. This whole world is horrible. I never thought I could think that. But…” she grunted. “I don’t understand it. How can people do this to each other?”
Teal’c said nothing. He had no answer for the cruelty of humans. Instead, he asked, “What of Daniel Jackson and Colonel O’Neill?”
Carter shook her head again, as though trying to shake off some mental malaise and clear her mind. “The Colonel is fine, a few cuts and bruises, no broken bones. He’s looking for Daniel.”
“I should join his search, if you do not mind?”
“Help me up, we’ll go together.”
Teal’c continued his search moving from carriage to carriage, Carter at his side. The rain and mud made it difficult to tell one face from another, and mixed with the pain, it became impossible. Up and down the line Jubal Kane’s men moved with brutal efficiency. They dragged the unconscious black and silver clad guards out of the twisted wreckage and dumped them on the embankment, and marched the conscious few at gunpoint. A fight broke out, dying before it could become more than a flurry of fists, as fat Nadal pistol-whipped the Corvani guard, laying him out cold. With grim satisfaction Jubal Kane’s man finished him. It turned Teal’c’s stomach. War was one thing, but this, this was slaughter. It had no place in honorable war. It was the kind of monstrosity the Goa’uld had forced him to perpetrate as First Prime. The psychology of it was simple: they had been beaten, their families tortured and killed, treated like scum, made to eat scraps from the dirt at the feet of these men, and now the worm had turned. The punishments they inflicted on the guards were less cruel, less unusual, but no less final once meted out. More gunfire ran out, this time single shot execution style.
When the anger had burned out, the righteous fury that demanded blood justice, then mercy would have its chance to win out, but for now there was a reckoning to be had. That, at least, was the kind of thinking the Jaffa could understand.
Teal’c walked away.
“You look like hell, buddy.”
He turned at the sound of O’Neill’s familiar voice behind him. The colonel had found a com
pact automatic pistol — that made sixty-nine guns — and was crouched down beside Daniel Jackson. He leaned in and had his hands — one over the other — pressed down hard over a deep wound. On the floor beside him lay a bloody wooden stake. More gunfire rattled the night.
Even through the rain and the dark, Teal’c could tell that his friend was in a bad way.
“Gonna need to brush up on my field medicine,” O’Neill said.
“I’d really rather you didn’t,” Daniel managed through clenched teeth.
“Quit being a girl, Daniel, and let me save your life. I can give you a bullet to bite on if you like?”
“Not necessary,” Daniel winced.
“Let’s get you patched up. We’ll let Fraiser handle the tough stuff.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Daniel Jackson said. He didn’t make another sound as O’Neill ripped strips from his shirt to pad the wound, and then bound it up with what was left. Without their kit there wasn’t much more he could do.
While O’Neill finished patching up Daniel Jackson, Teal’c debriefed them on what he had learned of the Goa’uld, Iblis, of Kiah, and of the tyrant Corvus Keen and the nature of the Rabelais Facility.
“Oh this day just keeps getting better and better,” O’Neill muttered, tying off the makeshift field dressing. “I don’t suppose you happened to overhear where this Goa’uld has hidden the Stargate, did you?”
“I did not.”
“Pity. Could have done with some good news right about now.”
“I found you alive, is that not good news?”
“Yeah, I guess it is, bud. I guess it is.”
* * *
The sixty-nine guns at Jubal Kane’s disposal became ninety-three. Five of the Corvani carried a second piece.
They had saved over nine hundred Kelani from the train. The numbers staggered Jack. Nine hundred. Jubal Kane’s men ushered them toward some unseen point in the distance. Jack knew the plan, what there was of one. He couldn’t argue with it because there wasn’t much to argue with. There had been fatalities, of course. Aside from the twenty Corvani Raven Guard, thirty-seven of the prisoners had proven too old and too weak to survive the crash. Another hundred or so were carrying injuries, broken bones, cuts, bruises. Some would die, most would make it.
The walking wounded helped with the worst of the victims, fashioning makeshift stretchers and the like to help bear them. Daniel had insisted on walking until the blood loss had made him all but pass out and O’Neill had insisted that, actually, no, Daniel couldn’t ‘walk just fine’, and made him take a ride on one of the stretchers.
Jubal Kane pointed at a dark smudge on the horizon. To Jack it looked no different than all of the other dark smudges he had seen as they walked. “The Rabelais Facility. It used to be a chemical processing plant until six months ago. Now it processes people. My people. That smoke, that’s some of them after they’ve been processed, if you catch my drift.”
O’Neill did. It wasn’t a particularly difficult drift to catch.
“The way I see it,” Jubal Kane continued, “we have a choice. Not much of a choice, I’ll grant you, but it’s still a choice. We can take these nine hundred hungry, sick and frankly beaten people back to the ghetto and await Keen’s retribution, or we can go about causing him some real pain. Those are our people in there, O’Neill. I think that makes it our call, don’t you?”
“And, let me guess, you’ve already made up your mind?” Jack squinted toward the smudge as though he might be able to make something else out of it. It stayed a black smudge no matter how much he screwed his eyes up.
“I have. We wouldn’t be walking this way otherwise.”
“Yeah? Well, good luck with that. All I want to do is get my people home. This isn’t our war.”
“Yet here you are in the middle of it, with no way to get your people home.” Kane stopped, a hand on O’Neill’s arm. “Help me win, and I will do everything I can to help you return home.”
“Those are long odds.”
“The Kelani are a strong people, O’Neill. Do not underestimate us.” He held out his hand. “Do we have a bargain?”
Jack looked at the offered hand, but did not take it. He didn’t trust this joker, not for a minute. There was stuff going on here he wasn’t party to, but just because he didn’t know what it was didn’t mean he couldn’t tell it stank. “Let’s talk to this explosives guy of yours and hear what he has to say for himself, shall we?”
The rain hadn’t let up in the last hour. Indeed, if anything it was worse now than it was when they had crawled out of the wreckage.
“Jachin, come here and explain to the colonel what we have in mind.”
Jack turned and gestured for Carter to join him. “Sir,” she nodded, wiping at the blood still smearing her face.
Jachin’s grin as he explained what he had in mind was wholly inappropriate. “Right, so, this place used to be a chemical processing plant. Most of the stuff has been cleaned out, the vats turned into holding cells, or worse. Anyway, we have intel that leads us to believe several of the chemicals they used to work with here were highly volatile in nature — and more interestingly for us, according to our man they aren’t exactly easy to clean away. We’re talking fumes eating into the metal of the vats themselves, and believe me, plenty of those pits are still lined with exactly the kind of explosive stuff we need for the fireworks.”
“Fireworks?” O’Neill said.
“Hasn’t Jubal explained?” Jachin shrugged, and then grinned. It was an infectious smile. Jack didn’t share it.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Well, we need a distraction, right?”
“Right.”
“We’re just talking about a lot of flash and bang, these are our people in there, after all.”
O’Neill nodded along with the reasoning but he still didn’t like where this was going. It wasn’t the plan so much as the people behind it; the lack of discipline of the Kelani’s, the gung-ho attitude of some of them, and, no bones about it, Jubal Kane. The man just rubbed him the wrong way. He trusted him about as far as Daniel could throw him.
“Basically, big tank go boom,” Jachin said, matching the ‘boom’ with an expressive gesture. “And while the guards flap around trying to put the fires out, we go in. Simple as that.”
“Providing nothing goes wrong,” Carter said.
“Nothing can go wrong. I know my explosives.”
Jack grunted. “Something always goes wrong.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Somewhere a Clock is Ticking
In this case it didn’t so much go ‘wrong’ as it did ‘too well’.
Jachin did indeed know his explosives. He wired up a small device with a big enough charge to do more than singe a few eyebrows, and gave explicit instructions as to exactly where Carter should place it. Carter had drawn the metaphorical short straw. With O’Neill needed on the sharp end, ready to go in guns blazing, it was down to her as the smallest and fastest. She had argued O’Neill blue in the face. There wasn’t a viable alternative. He couldn’t be in both places at once. It was as simple as that. Still he had fought her on it every step of the way. It was his job to put his life on the line, not hers, was how he had so succinctly put it. That had ended the argument, but not in his favor. He didn’t trust Jubal. That distrust outweighed his protectiveness. That same distrust had steered him toward intervention in the first place. In a perfect world it would have been the insurgents attacking the encampment, the team not interfering with the history of this world. But there were times when it was impossible to merely observe, and this was one of them. There were too many lives and risk, and too many echoes of Earth’s own history to be ignored. So they had not only taken sides, they had become involved. And once involved, they were never going to sit back. They were committed to seeing this through to the bitter end.
She scurried forward, keeping as low as she could, head down looking at her feet as she moved, then back down to a tight cr
ouch. Only then did she look up to scout out her next resting place. The rain had eased off, but hadn’t stopped. It made it easier for her to move unseen, but harder for her to hear anyone who might have gotten a little too close for comfort. All she could hope, as she offered a silent prayer to whatever god, demon, devil, imp or sprite, watched over bombers, was that it meant they couldn’t hear her either. Fair was fair, after all.
She dropped down flat onto her stomach and crawled on elbows and knees through the short grass. Searchlights from the watchtowers strobed across the facility erratically, lacking any kind of identifiable pattern. Either the soldiers manning the lights were exceptionally disciplined, or they were chasing moths with the bright beams. Either way, it made her job of slipping in under the fence unnoticed that much more difficult.
Sam counted out three minutes. In that entire time the searchlights didn’t cross the same patch of ground once. Sometimes they played out toward the dark corners, other times they ran along the edge of the perimeter fence or right through the center of the yard. Once, midway through the count, one of the lights worked its way up the wall of the five story building and illuminated the entire roof.
It was an elaborate dance. She half expected hippos in tutus to pirouette their way from super trooper to super trooper.
There were seven chemical vats. They were huge cylindrical containers lined up like bowling pins that towered over the complex more than ten times her height. Full, one of those going up was going to provide more than fireworks. God only knew what the residual fumes would do — God only knew what the residual fumes were.
Her instinct was to hit the first one at the front of the diamond — in terms of line-of-least-resistance it was the easiest both to reach and to escape, but it was also the easiest one for the searchlight to pick out, so she discounted it.
She moved forward to a grassy knoll, ten feet closer to the fence, where she could better see the comings and goings of the guards. Right then she would have killed for a pair of binoculars never mind night vision goggles. She had nothing but the moon.
SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne Page 22
