06 - Siren Song

by Jamie Duncan

  “You might want to fish one out for yourself,” he told her, without actually pointing out that she looked like hell.

  She met his eyes for a long moment, then said, “I’m fine, sir.”

  He nodded, completely unconvinced, but there was no time to get into the finer details of Carter’s psyche. Two Jaffa had appeared at their doorway, not quietly, but without the usual fanfare. Maybe that was what the kid considered “sneaking up”, from his kid-perspective. Jack could’ve backed away from the door without needing to be told, but it was more satisfying to make them work for it.

  “Step away,” the Jaffa ordered. Teal’c positioned himself in front of the boy, for all the good it would do.

  “Must be room service with our breakfast,” Jack said. “Hope they got the eggs right.”

  With a hiss, the lock released and the door slid open. When Aris Boch stepped between the guards into the room, his weapon holstered, the kid gasped but said nothing. Jack could practically feel the kid’s muscles twanging as the boy scrambled to his feet behind Teal’c. Anger, or excitement; hard to say. Aris didn’t look at his son.

  “I hope the three of you managed to get some rest,” Aris said. “You’ll have a busy day ahead of you.”

  “Great accommodations,” Jack said. “Nice beds.”

  “It’s the best you’re going to get, under the circumstances,” Aris said. “But you won’t be needing one tonight.”

  “No?” Jack said. “Do tell.”

  “Sebek has ordered me to bring you back to the vault.”

  There it was. Not unexpected. “You mean, Daniel,” Jack said, putting a nice sharp point on his friend’s name.

  “No, I mean Sebek,” Aris said, just as sharply. “Better get used to it.”

  “Not likely,” Jack said.

  Carter bent down to pick up her jacket, but Aris waved her off. “Won’t be needing you today, Major. Just the Colonel here.”

  “Why?” Carter said, then caught herself. “Er, I mean… not that the Colonel’s not useful, but you might need my help. That device by the door may be an access panel,”

  “Sebek’s got that taken care of. With Dr. Jackson’s help, of course.” The idea that Daniel would help Sebek in any way made Jack’s blood pressure notch up ten points, but this wasn’t the time to start a battle. There’d be plenty of chances for that later. Aris crooked a finger at Jack. “Let’s go.”

  “Thanks so much for the vote of confidence,” Jack said to Carter, unable to resist.

  “You know what I meant, sir,” she said, face wrinkling up into an apologetic grimace.

  “Father?” From behind Teal’c, the kid’s voice seemed much smaller, more unsure, than it was before, and he looked a lot more like a boy now, less like a teenager. The expression on Aris’ face didn’t change, but his eyes went toward the sound, and toward Teal’c standing watch over him. Teal’c didn’t seem to see a difference between the Jaffa and the bounty hunter, where the kid was concerned.

  Aris moved toward his son. Teal’c, who had been a wall of resistance until that moment, began to step aside but even so Aris shouldered into him, staggering him off-balance. His face stony, eyes fierce, Teal’c righted himself and stepped smoothly back into Aris’ path. When Jack twitched forward, one of the Jaffa shoved the tip of a staff weapon into his back. Teal’c raised a warning hand, but Aris caught it and knocked it aside.

  “Don’t interfere,” Aris said, in a low voice. He and Teal’c stared at each other for a long moment. Behind Jack, one of the Jaffa chuckled softly, anticipating blood like a dog waiting for the kill.

  Teal’c glanced up and met Jack’s eyes. There was a message in that direct stare, but Jack had the frustrating feeling that he wasn’t catching on. He dropped his gaze to Teal’c’s hand, the one Aris had pushed away; Teal’c’s fingers were curled under, protecting something from view. Not enough time to get a good look, because Teal’c clasped his hands behind his back, like he was giving up the field.

  Now Jack’s eyebrow rose. Whatever Aris was up to, Teal’c was playing along. Teal’c moved one shoulder aside, a minute gesture, and allowed Aris to pass.

  Aris dropped to one knee beside the boy and briefly laid a hand on his hair, not quite ruffling it. With his thumb, he rubbed smudges of dirt off the boy’s face, but he said nothing. When he stood and returned to Jack’s side, he ignored Teal’c. “Let’s go,” he said, and headed off down the corridor without looking back.

  With a last glance at Carter and Teal’c, Jack followed.

  Sam leaned into the bars and peered into the hallway. It wasn’t getting darker—the lights were glowing as steadily as ever—but it felt that way. As she stared, the hallway seemed to get narrower and longer and grey around the edges. Her knees were wobbly, and she had to curl her fingers around one of the vertical struts and breathe slowly with her head down until the dizziness passed. If something was going to happen, it had to be soon.

  “What does Sebek want with him?” she wondered aloud, her forehead resting on the bars while she watched the remaining Jaffa pace his way to the far end of the corridor, pause, turn rather less than smartly and come toward her. He held her gaze for a long moment, his mouth slanted up in a leer. She rolled her eyes and leaned her back on the bars instead. “He’s got Daniel. What can the Colonel offer him?”

  The passing guard leaned closer than necessary, made a low noise that had to be the Jaffa equivalent of “how you doin’?” which was so not right, she didn’t even have a category for it. She stepped away from the support of the bars and aimed a warning scowl in his direction. It got her a growling laugh in return.

  “Hands off,” she muttered, not quite loud enough for the Jaffa to hear.

  Over by the wall, the kid was watching her. After a moment he smiled thinly, shook his head and looked at the floor. Teal’c was following the guard with his eyes, and for brief moment, the look on his face reminded her of her brother, way back in the Dark Ages before she’d joined the Air Force, when he thought she was the one who needed protecting. She was gratified to see Teal’c’s expression shift immediately to a sort of smug warning, not of what he’d do, but what she could. She smiled tightly at the Jaffa, asking him to try his luck. The guard’s laughter died abruptly. Teal’c kept staring until the guard moved on out of sight.

  Sam shrugged it off and went on, “You don’t think Sebek needs a new host already, do you?”

  She looked the question at the kid, but he was picking at his toenails and clearly not interested in what the Goa’uld might want with Colonel O’Neill. Not that he’d know anything, anyway, except maybe about how to die in a mine before he turned fifteen. His reddish hair was thinning at the crown, she noticed, and his scabby scalp showed through. She wondered if he’d seen protein in the last year.

  “Maybe you’re next,” the kid said without looking up, and Sam’s sympathy got a little harder to hang on to.

  “Perhaps not,” Teal’c said, drawing her attention.

  He was holding something between his finger and thumb, a wafer about the size and thickness of a credit card. He flipped it over and angled it into the light cast through the bars from the corridor. It gleamed dully for a second before he palmed it as the guard made his slow progress past them again.

  When the guard was gone, Sam stepped closer and Teal’c held the contraband out to her. It felt like a credit card, too, except that instead of embossed with numbers it was a featureless grey. She raised her eyebrows at Teal’c. “Aris slipped you this?”

  “He did.”

  “Did he include a note telling you what it is?”

  “He did not.”

  She turned to the kid. “Hey.” He didn’t look up. “Can you tell me your name?”

  He raised his eyes slowly and looked at her from under lowered brows.

  “Fine. We’ll go with Mr. Boch Junior, for now.” She held the card out for him to see. “Do you know what this is?”

  The spark in his eyes said “yes”; his shrug said
he wouldn’t tell her anyway. Sam wondered if teenage attitude was coded in the human genome, because the annoying body language seemed to be universal. Cassie could have brought this guy home to drive Janet nuts. Sam sighed. “Your dad slipped this to us. Maybe you’ve seen something like it before.”

  There was definitely something going on in that head, no doubt about it. His eyes didn’t leave the card as she flipped it over, ran her thumb along its edge. He shrugged again, as the guard appeared on his annoyingly regular drive-by. She followed Teal’c’s example, hiding the card in her closed hand.

  The kid started to scream.

  Sam whirled to look at him and found him on his feet, his face inches from hers. The smell of rotten teeth and hunger assaulted her as he screamed out the last of his breath and sucked in another. He didn’t look scared or angry. He was just screaming, long, raw-voiced howls, his fists clenched at his sides.

  Before Sam could think of what to do in these perfectly bizarre circumstances, and before Teal’c could put his hand on the kid’s skinny shoulder or ask what was wrong, the cell door slid open and the guard was inside, his staff aimed at a space somewhere between them as if he, too, were confused and more than a little unsure as to whom he should be threatening.

  “Cease this noise!” he bellowed.

  The boy sucked in another breath. Then, mid-howl, he snatched the card from Sam’s hand and made a break for the door.

  It was insane. The Jaffa was right there, but the kid was spider-fast and managed to make it a single step past him, just close enough to the door to grab the doorjamb with one hand. The guard didn’t bother to wrestle with him. He simply clotheslined him with the staff and flipped him onto his back on the floor, finishing with the tip of the staff pressed into the kid’s sternum. Teal’c lunged forward to get a hand on the guard’s arm. The guard twisted his arm free, and in that moment, as Sam was pulling back a fist, she caught movement from the corner of her eye. A second guard outside the bars. The warning she tried to shout was chopped in half by her grinding teeth as the zat fire hit her, snapping her head back and whiting out her vision in a searing flare of pain.

  “Dirt-crazy,” someone said. And someone else was laughing.

  With an effort, Sam managed to peel open an eye. Her bones were humming; she could hear it, the blue dance of residual energy crackling around inside her skull, and a ghostly skirling along her limbs. She was leaning up against the cell wall, the weight of a large, firm hand on her shoulder keeping her from dissolving altogether.

  “They all go dirt-crazy,” the second guard replied to the first. They watched through the bars, their faces twisted in identical sneers of distaste.

  Beside her, the kid was in hysterics. In fact, he was laughing so hard he had his arms wrapped around his middle and was slowly sliding sideways until he was lying on the floor, curled up tight.

  With a snort of disgust, the second guard walked away. Sam counted his footsteps. There had to be another room beyond the cells, one that she hadn’t seen when they came in. Only one guard in there? More? She swallowed hard against the rising of her stomach and closed her eyes. The kid was winding down to hiccups, each one a hook catching in her brain. The first guard stared at them for a moment before returning to his pacing.

  “What is amusing?” Teal’c asked.

  The question must have been very funny, because it started the kid off again. Only, this time, the laughter thinned to a wheeze that ended in a suppressed sob. Sam could feel his bony body shaking next to hers. Her eyes on the empty hallway beyond the bars, she groped blindly for him and laid a hand on his shoulder but he shrugged her off, then pushed himself up so he could slouch a couple of feet away from her.

  He scrubbed his eyes angrily on the backs of his wrists before answering. “Dirt-crazy,” he said, wiping his nose on ragged sleeve of his tunic. “We all go dirt-crazy.” Tapping the side of his head with a grubby finger, he crossed his eyes and let his tongue loll.

  “Grit for brains. Corroded.” His face fell again into its regular lines of resentment as he looked over Teal’c’s shoulder at the bars. “So they say.”

  Teal’c thinned his lips in a frown of understanding tinged with disapproval. “It was imprudent to act as you did.”

  The kid watched the guard pass the cell, and then his eyes slid to Teal’c’s and he lifted a hand from his lap to point at the door. “Perhaps not,” he contradicted, perfectly mimicking Teal’c’s earlier intonation.

  Teal’c turned to look. Something was bubbling along the edge of the door. A thin, viscous grey line drooled down along the seam between the door and the wall. Sam could smell something like lemons. Flapping her hand against Teal’c’s leg, she waited for him to stand and then lever her up to her feet. She peered first at the door, then at the kid.

  “Some kind of acid?” she guessed. He shrugged, but the side of his mouth curled up for a second. “The card?” The other side of his mouth turned up too.

  She braced herself against the bars near the door and tried to see if the solvent was visible from the outside. She couldn’t tell. The guard was leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor, but he straightened up when she leaned out, so she pulled back again and listened for his approach. No footfalls. He seemed content to take a break from the pacing for a moment, having made his point about their chances of escape. Beside her, the drool had slithered its way to the floor. There was a faint hiss as the locking mechanism released.

  She grinned at Teal’c, who came to stand in front of the door. “Hey, kid,” she said.

  “Aadi,” he corrected her. He walked himself up the wall with his hands but didn’t come to join them.

  “Sorry. Aadi.” She spared some of the grin for him. “You get ready to move when I say, okay? And stick close to us. Got it?”

  He nodded.

  She leaned her head against the bars again and caught the guard’s eye. “Excuse me,” she called. “Can we get some water?” It was only a gambit, but the word “water” made her already parched mouth even drier.

  “Rations at dawn,” the guard answered.

  “Look, we haven’t had any water for two days.”

  “Rations at dawn,” he repeated.

  Making a show of desperation that wasn’t all that much of a show, Sam bowed her head and let out a little sob. Then, reluctantly, she raised her head and asked, “What do I have to do to get some now?” The cajoling drift of her voice made her feel way more than a little creepy.

  At that, the guard shouldered himself away from the wall and strolled toward her. His smile showed perfect white teeth. When he shot a quick look down the hall, probably toward the guardroom, Sam caught a faint, milky glow in his right eye and noted the puckering of his eyelid. That must be why he was doing chump work guard duty instead of fighting with Yu’s army: some old injury the larval Goa’uld couldn’t fully heal. He was partially blind, maybe had some trouble with depth perception. Sliding a glance at Teal’c, she rubbed her finger next to her right eye and he nodded again.

  Then she aimed her own smile at the guard as he leaned in closer. She licked her lips and went on, “I bet I could trade something. No one has to know.”

  As the guard was opening his mouth to speak, Teal’c—hidden by the door and the guard’s blind spot—cracked the door open, snaked an arm through the gap and grabbed him by the neck. Teal’c stifled the guard’s surprised yelp with his other hand, then stepped into the corridor. He spun the guard around so his back was against the bars and Teal’c’s forearm was across his windpipe. From inside the cell, Sam held one of the guard’s arms with one hand and caught his falling staff weapon with the other. The Jaffa thrashed silently for a moment and went limp. Teal’c let him slide to the floor, then took the staff from Sam. She came into the corridor and unclipped the zat from the guard’s wrist.

  Looking down at him she whispered, “Please tell me I’m no good at that seductress stuff.”

  “You are merely proficient,” Teal’c answered. Sam g
rinned.

  Only an alien male could’ve walked the line that effectively.

  “Good,” she answered. “Next time, you get to bat your eyelashes, and I get to do the strangling.” She stood and whispered to Aadi, who was hovering in the doorway, “Stay here.” Then she sidled down the hall toward the guardroom, Teal’c close behind.

  It was gloomier at this end, and a rectangle of light fell through the open door into the hallway. Sam crouched low to duck her head around and peek inside. She pulled back to lean against the wall beside the door, raising one finger at Teal’c. Then she took a deep breath, spun on her knee into the doorway and fired the zat.

  A nice, clean shot. The second guard didn’t even have time to turn his head from his console. He finally went slack, his head lolling backward as the energy arced and sizzled around him.

  While she was collecting his zat and Teal’c was hooking the fallen staff with his foot and flipping it up to catch it, Sam called up the map of the complex she carried in her head. The route they’d taken in would be easy to retrace, but it wound through some high-traffic areas near the entrance. Plus, there was another problem.

  She stepped back into the corridor to wave at Aadi, who looked suspiciously both ways before trotting up to her.

  “How well do you know this place?” she asked. “Have you been in other sections?”

  “Give me a weapon,” he replied.

  “We’ll protect you,” she answered. “Look, we need our gear. Would your dad have kept it with him or turned it over to the Jaffa?”

  Aadi set his jaw and looked at the floor. Sam sighed.

  “Do you even know how to work one of these?” She held up the second zat.

  “I’ve watched.”

  “Are you going to follow my orders?”

  He nodded. When she didn’t hand the zat over, he met her eyes. “Yes, I’ll follow orders,” he said with exasperated formality.

  . Even though she’d always thought of herself as rather fond of children, Sam had to wonder if it were possible to keep kids while they were cute and then maybe send them someplace at puberty until they were human again. Military academy, she thought suddenly, and added, Sorry, Dad. She didn’t bother to hide her reluctance as she gave Aadi the zat and showed him the firing key.