by Jamie Duncan
Jack set his jaw. There was no right answer, though it didn’t matter what he said; Aris wasn’t stupid, and there was no way he’d leave either Jack or Teal’c behind as long as he held two of their teammates prisoner. He wouldn’t want them on his trail. “Looks like we’re all taking a ride.”
“Sir,” Carter began, but Jack cut her off with a look.
Aris watched the exchange, then said, “Colonel O’Neill, I’m wounded that you don’t trust me with the safety of your people.”
“Trust?” Jack echoed. His finger twitched on the trigger of the P90, itching for a viable target. “You’ve never given us a reason to trust you.”
“How quickly your people forget.” Aris pointed at Teal’c. “I let a Tok’ra go, and I saved his life.”
“I have not forgotten,” Teal’c said, in a low growl. “But this is a new day.”
A fleeting look of remorse crossed Aris’ face. “Sorry about the knock on the head, Teal’c. It’s business. Nothing personal.”
Teal’c inclined his head in that stiff way that told Jack he was going to get his payback, eventually.
“Anyway,” Jack said impatiently, “you didn’t do it for Teal’c. You did it because you hate the Goa’uld.”
“You know, that’s right,” Aris said as if it had just occurred to him. He smiled again. “It’s irrelevant, though. Right now, you don’t have a choice. You are, in fact—say it with me, now—choice-less.”
“I hate that word,” Jack muttered.
“Sorry to cut short the small talk, but now you’re all going to march to my ship like good, obedient little soldiers,” Aris said. Although he still had his weapon trained on Teal’c, Jack knew he could as easily point it at any one of them and ensure compliance. “Drop your gear here—I’ll ring it up later.” A few feet from Jack’s face, a shimmer of red as the shield dissolved and fell in front of them. Aris stood patiently by, waiting.
Starting with Daniel and ending with Teal’c, Jack met the eyes of each of his team in turn as they stripped off their weapons and gear. No way in hell were they boarding that ship. Once they were inside the hold, there was no guarantee they’d be able to make it out again before it was too late. Besides, they still had no idea what the bounty hunter wanted them for, and all of Jack’s instincts screamed that this was a disaster in the making. He motioned to Carter and Daniel to move out, then followed with Teal’c at his side. Aris was behind them, not too close, but close enough.
He couldn’t shoot them both in time.
Jack and Teal’c moved apart a few steps. At Jack’s unspoken signal, they made their move. A turn and a leap… and Jack found his nerve endings on fire. All his limbs stopped cooperating; he sprawled on the ground, shaking and twitching. It was ten times worse than being zatted. He gasped and gritted his teeth, trying to ride out the pain.
Somewhere nearby rose the muffled thud of a body hitting a personal shield—that would be Teal’c, Jack’s brain helpfully supplied—and then Teal’c was on the ground next to him, flat on his back. Jack’s hands and arms spasmed, and his spine was melting. After a moment, the white fire racing around his body died down to intermittent sparking, and he took a deep breath. So much for the brilliant escape.
“Teal’c. I’m disappointed in you,” Aris said, leaning over him.
“It is, as you say, business,” Teal’c replied. He sat up and reached out to Jack, who waved away his concern.
“I’m all right,” Jack breathed, though his muscles were still trembling.
Aris leaned in and wagged the point of his blaster at Jack. “Just so you know, I’m trading you first.”
Jack lay on his back on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. He drummed his fingers against his chest, tapping out the opening bars of “Smoke on the Water”. “Slo-ow motion Wa-alter,” he sang under his breath. The ceiling looked familiar. Just like the ceilings of all the tel’taks in his life, swirly brushed metal and random intersecting arcs. He pretty much hated tel’taks, he decided, slapped his hands down on the floor beside him and ended with a loud, “That fire engine gu-uy!”
Daniel’s head jerked up from his chest. Teal’c raised an eyebrow. Carter glanced over her shoulder and went back to futzing with the door controls.
After unhooking his glasses from the collar of his shirt, Daniel slipped them on one-handed and peered at him. “Who?”
“Slow motion Walter,” Jack answered. Lifting his head, he waved a hand. “You know, the fire engine guy.” When Daniel’s lips pursed and his eyes narrowed, Jack sighed and let his head fall back against the floor. “Are you telling me you never listened to Deep Purple?”
“Smoke on the water,” Teal’c said. “Fire in the sky.”
Jack rolled his head to look at Daniel and aimed a finger at Teal’c. “See? The alien knows Deep Purple.”
A self-satisfied expression crept over Teal’c’s features as he closed his eyes and went back to being a statue.
Carter’s yelp and a shower of sparks cut off whatever Daniel had been about to say. “Damnit!” she hissed and sucked the ends of her fingers while she walked in a tight circle, ending up back at the door panel.
“You okay?” Jack craned his neck to look at her.
She took her fingers out of her mouth long enough to say “Yes, sir,” and went back to glaring at the panel.
Through the door they could hear Aris Boch laughing. The intercom switched on with a click, and Aris’ laughter was in the aft cargo space with them. “You break it, you’re going to owe me. These things aren’t cheap, you know.”
“If you open the door and let us hit you on the head with something heavy, we won’t have to break anything at all,” Jack pointed out reasonably.
“Except his head,” Daniel corrected him.
“Yeah, except that.”
After a pause, Aris gave a rumbling chuckle. “You aren’t going to get through the door until I let you, and the only other way out of there is the rings. You’ll want to hold your breath, though, if you go that route.”
“You first,” Carter grumbled as she leaned close to the open panel again and started pulling out crystals and putting them in her pockets for safe-keeping.
“I heard that,” Aris responded, sounding wounded. “And you’d better put those crystals back like you found them. Since I am going to have to let you out of there eventually.”
Jack rolled to his feet, looking in the general direction of Aris’ voice. “And why is that? What the hell do you want with us this time?”
“With you? Nothing. But Dr. Jackson there is going to be useful. As is Major Carter.”
Jack leaned closer to the com panel and said, “Nobody’s doing squat for you, so forget it.”
“Maybe,” Aris conceded. “Or maybe…” This time his pause lasted so long that, by the time he took up the thought again, they were all looking at the ceiling and the hidden intercom speaker, waiting. “Maybe I’ll appeal to your nobility.” Somehow he made the word sound nasty. “You like to be heroes, right?” When none of them bothered to answer, he snorted, half-amused, half-disgusted. “Or maybe I’ll shoot off your fingers or something, Colonel, until Dr. Jackson does his job. Either way, I’m going to get what I need.”
With a frown, Daniel got slowly to his feet. He chewed his lip for a moment, staring at the floor. His hands found their way into his pockets as he assumed the casual, thinky pose that invariably made Jack nervous, and said, “What, exactly, do you need?”
“Daniel,” Jack warned.
“Just tell me,” Daniel said, holding up a hand to silence Jack.
Jack wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard Aris sigh. “Nothing much. Do some reading. Keep the Goa’uld from killing everybody.”
“Oh,” Daniel said, ducking his head and then looking up at Jack, a little grin giving him crinkles around his eyes. “That again.”
Carter smiled, not quite showing teeth.
Jack sat down next to Teal’c and laced his fingers over his knees. “You rememb
er how to do it?” he asked Daniel.
Daniel shrugged. “Like riding a bike, right?”
“A little, only usually with more—”
“Gunfire,” Teal’c said.
“And yelling,” Carter added.
“And insolence,” Jack said. “You remember your insolence?”
Daniel patted his pockets. “I know I’ve got it here somewhere.”
“You are all very amusing.” Aris didn’t sound all that amused. “Sebek is going to laugh the whole time he’s killing you.”
“Sebek?” Jack looked the question at Daniel, whose face had already lit with puzzled recognition.
Daniel shook his head. “According to Tok’ra intelligence, Sebek—also known as Sobek—is dead. Bastet and Kali the Destroyer allied against him and killed him. Bastet took his head as her trophy.”
“Or not,” Jack said.
“No, that was reliable intelligence,” Daniel said. “In fact, other Goa’uld believed it to be true. Yu didn’t contradict me, when I mentioned it.”
“While you were his slave?” Jack raised his eyebrows. “You and Yu had a lot of these little conversations?”
“A few,” Daniel said, raising his eyebrows back. “Sebek was never one of the big players, I don’t think. But I could be wrong. There’s still stuff—” He fluttered his fingers next to his temple. “—missing.”
“That’s inconvenient,” Jack observed and, ignoring Daniel’s half-pained, half-pissed expression, turned to Teal’c. “T? You heard of this one?”
“There are many minor Goa’uld in service to the system lords, and many planets to be administered.”
“Administered.” Aris’ voice crackled over the intercom, brittle with irony and anger. “Right. That’s what he’s doing, administering.” The intercom clicked off.
Slumping down next to Jack, Daniel leaned his head back against the wall and stared into the middle distance. The brain was working. Jack could practically see him feel around the edges of the gaps in his memory. He looked away.
More sparks showered out of the control panel, and Carter jumped back and did a few more tight circles before shifting crystals around again.
Teal’c closed his eyes and was quiet, resting while somehow remaining alert, waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Not for the first time, he reminded Jack of fire, banked low and hot in the centre.
Jack drummed on his knees. “Slo-ow motion Wa-alter,” he sang under his breath. “That fire engine gu-uy.”
By Sam’s watch, they’d been in the cargo hold for a little over eighteen hours. The Colonel and Daniel had “I-spied” every single item in the room—which wasn’t much, besides a couple of empty storage cases and themselves—but when Daniel had started with “I spy with my little eye something that means ‘gift of the Nile’,” the Colonel had gotten testy and made a new rule outlawing the hieroglyphics in Goa’uld tel’tak wallpaper. After that, the game had deteriorated into an argument regarding the relative cultural value of Hammurabi’s Code and The Simpsons, and she exchanged a quick glance with Teal’c to make sure he’d be ready to move if they had to intervene and wrestle the two of them to their separate corners. Eventually a remarkable detente was forged over the structural similarities of strip comics and petroglyphs, and Sam dropped her head against Teal’c’s shoulder and let herself slip into a shallow doze. In her dream, the stars were stretched in long, solid bars, rainbowed as their light passed through the prism of hyperspace, and the tel’tak rode along those rails toward some distant point of blackness.
Falling into the gravity well, she woke with a jerk. Daniel was watching her.
“Bad dream?”
She shook her head, then rolled her shoulders, wincing as her spine crackled. Beside her, Teal’c was asleep sitting up. The Colonel was over next to Daniel, on his back, his cap over his eyes.
She braced a hand against the wall and levered herself up. One step over Daniel’s legs took her to the tiny bathroom—at least Aris had left them with facilities, and she even had some water in her canteen. Their kits and all of their gear, including the rest of the water and the MREs, were in the forward compartment with him. The toilet had no tank and used some kind of chemicals in any case, and there was no sink in there, either. No use in thinking about their out-of-reach canteens, so she returned to the cargo hold and, with a pat on Daniel’s shoulder, went back to fiddling with the door control panel.
After a few minutes, Daniel came and stood next to Sam, arms folded across his chest. He leaned forward to look around the panel door. “Not making much progress here,” he observed quietly.
“Actually, I think he’s got the system completely cut off from this side,” she said.
“But the sparks—”
“Mostly for show, to string me along.” She switched a blue crystal for a red one with the same lack of results she got the last time she’d tried that. “And to tick me off.”
“If you know he’s got it rigged so it can’t be accessed at all from in here, why have you spent the last day working on it?”
With another shrug, she pulled out the red chip and replaced it with a clear one. “Because if he rigged it, he must have rigged it somehow, and if I can figure that out, maybe I can get around it.” A little more fruitless twiddling, and she added, “And besides—”
“It gives you something to do.”
“I never was good at ‘I Spy’.”
“Nor was I,” Teal’c said softly. He rose and rolled his shoulders. Then he stepped to the middle of the room and began to work his way through the fluid poses of a training exercise, loosening muscles stiff with waiting. Sam paused in her work for a little while to watch him and marveled at how deadliness could look so beautiful. Daniel watched, too, his face falling into lines of concentration, his eyes becoming more and more distant, as though Teal’c’s orderly gestures were a part Daniel’s own mental exercise, a physical mantra that led Daniel inward. Sam watched him watch Teal’c and resisted the urge to smooth the frown from his forehead.
Finally, as Teal’c came to the end of the sequence and began again, she turned back to the crystals with a sigh. Blue, clear, red, green. If she had a screwdriver she could pull the whole housing out of the wall, and then she’d be getting somewhere, maybe. Over the hum of the hyperspace engines, she could hear Teal’c’s measured breathing. Blue, clear, red, green. The Colonel slept, rationing resources. Daniel explored the inside of his head, on the trail of details about Sebek, things he’d known in another life. The cargo hold seemed charged with potential energy, stored up, going nowhere. Or somewhere.
When Daniel spoke, his soft voice made her jump. “You know,” he ventured tentatively, “we could let him take us where he wants and maybe see if we actually can help.”
“Go where Aris Boch wants us to go? I don’t think that will sit well with the Colonel.”
“Aris said that there are people in danger. Keeping the Goa’uld from killing people isn’t such a bad thing.”
“You’re assuming we can believe a single thing he says.” She was tempted to start prying at the housing again, but her fingertips were still a little numb from the last time, so she settled for glaring at the panel. “I’m not sure I want to stake my life on it.”
He looked at his boots, his jaw set. “We know his people are oppressed.”
“Most of the galaxy is oppressed.”
“That’s the tricky part, isn’t it?”
She fumbled the crystal she was holding and caught it against her stomach. In the center of the room, Teal’c stopped moving and became an attentive stroke of darker space at the fringes of her vision.
Daniel went on, “How do you decide what… who… is worth dying for?”
“You tell me,” she demanded before she could stop herself. Sam felt a sudden anger expanding inside her chest, making her throat bum.
Daniel’s wince put the fire out fast. More than a little appalled at herself, she closed her eyes and tried not to think of First
Minister Dreylock and her denial of Kelownan culpability in the accident that had taken Daniel’s life. Dreylock had made Daniel into a criminal. And that was a crime.
As if he were the rebellious voice in her head, Teal’c said, “Some neither appreciate nor seem to deserve such sacrifice.”
Daniel looked at him, and, after a moment of consideration, straightened from the wall. “People are people. Appreciation isn’t the point. You don’t ask for the appreciation of the Jaffa when you fight for them. You don’t ignore their oppression because they’re undeserving. You believe in their freedom, even if some of them don’t.”
Sam looked from Teal’c to Daniel and back again. Teal’c had a point; the smaller, meaner part of her came back to Dreylock, her insufferable, arrogant self-righteousness as she’d accepted Daniel’s gift while simultaneously insisting it was valueless. The anger flared again. The Colonel had fought until the moment of Daniel’s death to prove that his sacrifice meant something. The thought of Aris selling that kind of sacrifice for his own gain made her sick. But Daniel was right, too; even Teal’c acknowledged it. The conflict between the two positions made an irritating noise in her brain, like the grinding of gears that failed to mesh. She rubbed her temple with her knuckles as if she could get in there and fix that. Now, Sam tried not to see Daniel in the infirmary bed, held together by bandages, dissolving into light. Gone. Instead, she looked at him standing two feet away from her, miraculously remade, completely new, still himself. All the same, anger glowed under the ashes.
She plucked at his sleeve to make him look at her. “Sorry,” she said earnestly. She could see him reading her thoughts in her expression. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t.”
“Yes you do,” he said with a brief smile that held no irony, only affection. “It’s okay. I get it.” He gave his own original question serious consideration. “On Kelowna, I don’t think I actually made a choice. I think circumstances made the choice for me.”
