by Jamie Duncan
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.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Our—” His lips closed, and the sentence became a bemused hum instead. Still, though, the thought continued on with its own momentum inside his head, undulating outward like an unfurling ribbon—empire—and dividing, options fluttering toward the horizon, each with its own arcing trajectory: self, hopes, right, doom. Even after they’d fallen still there was the smear of a ghostly afterglow, rumination on possible futures dissipating like jet trails against a blue sky.
He took a moment to learn what a “jet” was before he went back to staring at the writing on the vault door. For a second, he could feel the gaze inside shift with his and roam briefly across the text. But it slid quickly, if reluctantly, back to him again. His host was appalled. That, Sebek was used to. It was the undisguised curiosity that was new. Slaves bowed their heads—kneel expanded outward and faded—or their eyes flickered across him with fear; the passing touch of their attention was the breathless, unworthy tribute of adulation. Slaves spoke to his feet because of his brightness; he could sear them with his godhead if he chose.
Watching this one become privy to his thinking, though, and mirror him back at himself through alien metaphors, this was unsettling. Now, Sebek found himself hunching his shoulders and turning this body away, sheltering, before he remembered, straightened, and raised his chin. “Our glory,” he said, and then said it again to hear the voice, to sharpen its softer edges to an appropriate blade of—arrogance—authority. The gaze within didn’t waver. No matter; soon there would be no need for this one, and Sebek would push it under the dark water and be alone again in his new royal seat.
But today there was a need for this one. Numb for a second, until he extended a ganglion and released the required protein, Sebek’s fingers followed the regular, precise edges of the script in the middle of the door. He smiled. Before, the words had been mere shapes, blocks and dashes without relationship to sound. Now, they were embedded in layers of voices, his voice in many languages, repeating, the same message whispered and shouted by many simultaneously, cacophony contained within the parameters of the text the way echoes are trapped in a room. With little effort he could focus on one, force the others into the background, but they continued to buzz at the periphery of his attention, blurred the way many voices speaking together were blurred, slightly desynchronized. It was a mystery how the host endured it, this sloppy overlapping. He could feel the pleasure the host took in this plurality and shook his head, disdainful. This one was Greek, this one Berber, this, Abydonian, here, English. Their names came to him easily. The Ancient symbols slipped into one frame or the other, but fit none precisely.
There were gaps and excesses, divergences, failings and silences, and each deviation or inexact translation was itself surrounded by a half-actualized halo of information: this people never developed private property; for that, death was not a state but a transition. It was an almost overwhelming density of context. The blue sky was not clear or empty at all, but full of swirling currents of activity.
Sebek had all the information he needed. But he didn’t know which information he needed. The overlapping, contradictory, complexly related contexts threatened to dissolve into an incomprehensible babble. He went deeper, seeking fundamentals. It was somewhat familiar, this delving, not so different from his own genetic recall where long-dead knowing stirred under his attention, lost its separateness, and became his own. But unlike his genetic memory, the organization of this mind, its system of relation and association, was chaotic, tangled and winding and likely to make sudden shifts that turned out sometimes to be shortcuts, often to be dead-ends. Sebek was used to dredging a mind f
or information, but the hosts of the past had been suppressed immediately, husk-hollow and nothing left of them but the whistling wind-sound of despair he could choose not to hear. But he didn’t just need what this one knew; he needed how he knew it. Not just vocabulary, but grammar. Not just the wine, but the bottle that gave it shape. He required this one’s presence. It was distasteful.
He wiped his fingers on his thigh as though they were sticky with the residue of the host’s presence. He forced himself to stop.
Behind him, Aris Boch’s boots scraped the stone, and his sigh of boredom, or possibly impatience, buffeted Sebek’s concentration.
“Leave us,” Sebek ordered them. He could feel the Jaffa exchanging glances. Aris’ soft snort of derision was aimed at their reluctance. Turning to face him, Sebek raised his eyebrow. “And you.”
“My lord,” his First Prime, Ankh’et said. “Your guard—”
“Knows better than to question our orders.” Sebek slid his gaze in Ankh’et’s direction. “If we repeat ourselves now, it will be the last thing you hear.” Sebek looked down and nudged the corpse at his feet with the tip of his boot. Its eyes were open and opaque with cataracts. Blood was caked around its slack, gaping mouth, its eyes and its ears. It looked like it could disintegrate like ancient parchment, and he had not used the host for long enough to make it into such a husk. He felt a tremor of consternation and quickly crushed it. “Take this. Burn it.”
After touching his knee to the floor, Ankh’et rose to attention. A flick of his fingers summoned the other Jaffa, and the two pulled the dead host up to its feet. One held it upright while the other stripped the ribbon device from its stiff fingers. Sebek held his new hand out to receive it, watching Aris while Ankh’et carefully put the golden caps into place. This host’s hands were bigger than the other’s, and the finger-caps were tight. The fingers were swollen a little, too, a residue of the trauma of blending. Sebek hadn’t been gentle. He reduced water retention and blood flow to the fingertips just a fraction, and the caps became more comfortable.
When the device was seated and the Jaffa had dragged the corpse up the incline into the tunnel, Sebek turned his palm upward and gazed at the crystal there. It took only a second for the glow to warm his skin with the prickle of deadly energy. Die pulsed, once, twice in his mind, and the crystal pulsed, too. He spread his hand wide and aimed the device at Aris. Aris was impassive, his face neither expectant nor defiant as he met Sebek’s eyes. Inside Sebek, the blue attention watched. Sebek could have allowed the pulsing command to translate itself into action, but instead he smiled. Aris betrayed no relief.
“And you,” Sebek repeated.
Aris was slow to respond to the order, his stare verging on openly insolent as he swung his blaster up—pausing as the muzzle passed Sebek’s chest—to rest on his shoulder. He backed up the slope to the tunnel entrance.
“Your usefulness is waning, my friend,” Sebek warned him. There was a flash of comprehension in Aris’ eyes. He surely had to know, now, that he was but a tool for use by his god.
“Then how ’bout you follow through on the deal, and I’ll be out of your hair? My lord.” The pause between demand and honorific was slight.
Sebek let his smile thin, more cruel than amused. “We will decide when you have fully fulfilled your obligations. We are obliged to do nothing.” Die pulsed again, throbbing behind his eyes, and he closed his mailed hand into a fist, lowered it to his side.
Aris looked like he was going to say more, but then his face hardened into a still mask. Instead of speaking, he took another backward step into the gloom of the tunnel and disappeared. Sebek dismissed him from thought and turned back to the door.
The silent script was more familiar now. It was oddly primitive-looking, as though the vaguely human figures dancing in an evocative, simplistic landscape had been scraped out with a crude tool. But the refined material of the impenetrable door belied that notion. Neither obviously metal and not quite stone, the substance was one that Sebek had never seen before, and a quick skim through the sea of past knowledge suggested that no Goa’uld in his line had, either. As simple as the figures appeared when taken one at a time, their overall arrangement, the way they seemed to interlock and mirror and parody each other, suggested that there was something sophisticated about them, something more than mere pictographic or even developed ideographic logic at work. “Ideographic,” he murmured aloud, testing the new word.
His fingers were numb again when he ran them over the carvings. Loss hissed for a second in his blood and was gone. Adjustments were made and then there was tingling and a settling in; his hands became his hands. The edges of the figures were still sharp. In all the eons that this door had remained closed, no one had caressed its message into smoothness, nor had the corrosive air within the mine dulled it. It had remained in this pristine state for him. It would whisper its secrets only to him. If.
He leaned forward and rested his forehead, then his cheek, against the words. He could sense it now, the secret purring against his eardrum, ready to resolve into speech. Somewhere in the clutter and whirl of the host’s stolen memories there was a key. But although the script was familiar and clearly waiting for Sebek, it was still opaque, and although Sebek closed his eyes and felt the secret leaving its mark on his skin, although he followed the host’s memory into the centre of this knot where dog-eared books fell open on loose spines, where the images of inscribed tablets and the staring stone faces of Easter Island were overlaid with the sharp-stale smell of fermented beer and the past-ripe scent of pink blossoms outside a window, there was no understanding there, nothing to unfold. What the host knew was that it didn’t know.
Sebek growled. Next to his cheek, the undeciphered writing seemed to hum through his bones. Inside, the blue gaze sharpened, attentive, and Sebek’s fingers were numb when he raised them and used them to rub at his eyes. He could still smell pink flowers and their cloying sweetness, brown-edged petals falling, past their prime—unbearable—Sebek pushed away from the wall, his empty hand outstretched toward the drifting memory—there, somehow at the center of the knot, something else. In the spring there were flowers in the trees, and Sebek felt grief bloom outward, a dark flower wilting against the blue, a vine knotted. He followed it backward, inward, downward. The host resisted, but there was no resisting now. The book in the memory, the images of staring stone sentinels and dancing human forms, blocky Ancient script, a bed with crumpled sheets and the shadows of branches, another bed, stained with seeping, blood, a knot of bandages around softening bone… experience lying in layers, connected not in time, but in sense. The smell of blossoms, brown, falling. Rot.
The pain in the memory was intense, and the host’s body jerked so that Sebek’s head struck the door sharply. He staggered a bit before he contained the response, created distance between himself and the memory and the host. In his mind’s eye he held them at bay, one in each hand, present and past, body and mind balanced across the fulcrum of his own perfect control. He turned his attention to the left hand where the memory throbbed. In it, this one, this host, was dying. His body was dissolving, and the petals of the flowers curled inward, brown, unanchored, drifted downward. Sebek was familiar with the sensation of dying—Bastet and Yu had taught him that—and with the miracle of awakening in the sarcophagus. This host knew that miracle, too; Sebek found the memory close by, the next page in the book. But this, this dying was different. Beyond the dying there was —fear, yearning—there was—escape, elation—beyond dying there was not death, and not the return to the heaviness of flesh. There was something more… wondrous.
This one had resisted, but there was no resistance now. Sebek breathed in the scent of flowers and around him vastness opened, embracing, fathomless plenitude. The stone faces stared up from the book, the figures paced their way through their dance from margin to margin, and beneath and beyond there was meaning, a slowly flowing ocean where this language was not unknown. The pictures in the book were mute, but the flow
ers outside the window were a doorway to something else. No. The memory in his hand was water in a broken bowl, and soon it would drain away. The body in his other hand thrashed.
When Sebek turned his head to look at the writing on the door, the blocky regularity of the Ancient script no longer spoke itself in twenty imperfect languages, but spoke in its own. And the second script behind it leaned so close, so close to Sebek’s ear he could practically feel it breathing. In the memory there was no flesh, no flesh at all, only release, expansion. No. No, no, no. In Sebek’s body, here and now, the host’s heart stumbled, recovered, began to race. Sebek strained to hear the voice, the secret. His breath came in heaving, sour gusts. The hands that braced him against the door were perfectly without feeling. No. No. The alien script had a voice that was sweet, promising, and the Ancient sea rocked back and forth speaking, speaking everything. And everything was there, just there, so vast and full it was like nothingness, and his body made a noise, a howl of pain.
“No!”
The word filled the room, leaving a hole inside him where it tore itself free. His throat hurt. “My—” he began, but, disoriented by contradiction, the sentence wouldn’t form. He felt himself lowered to the floor and his knees pulled up, as his arms hugged them and he rested his forehead on them. “My throat hurts,” the host rasped, his voice echoing thinly in the vault. “Mine, you son of a bitch.”
The first thing Daniel did was to thrash. His legs kicked out and his head cracked backward into the vault door, and it wasn’t enough. Sebek was still in there. After a long time, Daniel undamped his hands from the back of his neck. The fingernails of the left one were red crescents. The sight of the ribbon device on the other hand made him thrash again. Murder pulsed behind his eyes and the crystal in his palm glowed lividly. He scrambled away from it, away, anywhere. When he came back to himself he found he’d worked his way across the floor into the corner where the vault door met the black stone of the mine. He lay on his side, curled up tight, and his breath was hot and sickly with fear and anger. His hands were on the back of his neck again. The slick touch of the gold caps on his fingers made him retch, and he pulled at the ribbon device, abandoning the effort after a moment; it seemed too difficult. There was nothing in his stomach to come up, so he rolled onto his knees and spat onto the stone between his hands, then sat down, leaning against the wall.
