by Jamie Duncan
It certainly didn’t look like Goa’uld technology. Before Brenneka could continue on through the gate at the far side of the courtyard, Sam put a hand on her arm. “Wait. You mean the Goa’uld didn’t bring you here?”
This time, the smile wasn’t bitter, but brightened by pride. “We brought ourselves. With help from the gods.”
“The gods?”
“The Nitori.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of them.”
Brenneka pulled her arm free and ushered Sam ahead of her through the gate. “When the Goa’uld took the Homeworld, we fled. The legend says that the Nitori left us knowledge and chose one of our people—the Inspired—to entrust with the knowledge. He learned how to make the ships.” Glancing back, Sam saw her make a brief gesture with her hands, like she was setting a bird free. She remembered seeing Aadi do the same when they’d crossed the mosaic face. “The ships brought us here. This was a beautiful place, once. And a long time later, the Goa’uld found us again.” Her mouth was a grim line broken by the end of the scar. “The Inspired was gone, and there were no more ships.” Pushing past Sam, she pointed ahead. “It’s here.”
Brenneka reached into the pocket of her trousers and pulled out a key on a fob. She slipped it into a tiny gap in the wall. It turned with a click, and a door Sam hadn’t even been able to see opened a crack. Brenneka pushed it open and stooped to enter, Sam close behind. They found themselves at the top of a spiral staircase, all but the first few steps lost in darkness. Reaching into a small niche near Sam’s head, Brenneka pulled out a baton of about the length of her forearm. She rapped it sharply on the brick, then shook it until it began to emit a cool, blue light.
“This way.”
Sam had to walk fast to keep within the small illuminated circle. Made of worn stone, the stairs were uneven triangles set into the wall and winding tightly downward around a central point like the steps inside a lighthouse. Brenneka’s bare feet were sure, but Sam’s boots felt clumsy and too large and she had to hang onto the rough brick to keep her balance. There was no way of gauging how far they went, except by counting steps. Sam had counted two hundred and four when the stairs ended on a landing in front of another narrow door. Again the key came out, and the door opened silently on oiled hinges.
She couldn’t see to tell for sure, but the room they entered seemed cavernous and the cool, slick, green-smelling breath of air that washed over them as they moved deeper into the clammy chamber suggested an underground river nearby. Sam listened carefully but couldn’t hear any running water, only her own breathing and the echoing of her boots on the stone floor. Her skin was crawling with uneasiness. She hovered near the door, one hand groping for the wall and guiding her backward until her shoulders were leaning against brick. Brenneka looked over her shoulder, a ghost in her halo of blue light, then continued on to the left. After a few steps, she reached into another tiny alcove in the wall and a soft, yellow glow bloomed from sconces high up near the vaulted ceiling. With a shake, Brenneka extinguished her torch.
Sam looked up at the gilded ceiling, a good three or four stories above their heads, and thought of medieval churches. The walls were a mixture of brick and the black native stone. The floor was another detailed mosaic, faces and waves, stylized stars and solar systems, massive fish and featherless birds in a kaleidoscope of color. At the far end of the room a dais stood in front of a wall that seemed to be made of the same silvery metal as the spire outside, pitted and scored, blackened around the edges. The skin of a ship, Sam figured.
Brenneka regarded her through narrowed eyes. “Why are you here?”
A bit taken aback by the question, Sam blinked a few times while she looked for an answer other than the obvious. “Because your brother kidnapped us.”
Brenneka’s face fell into sharp lines of impatience. “You travel through the Stargates. Why are you out here?”
“Well, because we’re explorers.”
“Exploring.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“No?” Stepping closer, Sam looked at the remains of the ship. It seemed like that whole wall, all three stories of it, was of a piece. She couldn’t see any seams under the scarring. “Okay. Not just exploring. We’re looking for ways to fight the Goa’uld.”
“To save yourselves.”
“To save everyone the Goa’uld oppress.”
The sharp bark of Brenneka’s laugh clattered around in the rafters and was swallowed by the room. “A whole galaxy of worlds.”
“Nobody pretends it’s easy. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.” Sam held a hand out toward the other woman, thinking of Teal’c back at the pest house, held safe only by the strength of Brenneka’s word. “And we need allies. All the friends we can get.”
“We have nothing we can afford to give you. You see the way we live. Even if the Goa’uld were gone tomorrow, in a hundred lifetimes we’d never be what we were.” Brenneka gestured toward the remains of the ship behind her. Against the backdrop of the metal skin of the wall, her eyes were colorless.
“We could help you.”
“The mine is spent. We work twice as hard and bring out half as much. There’s nothing for you there.”
It was all Sam could do not to sigh, so she closed her eyes instead. “Maybe we’d help you because you’re people. Just because you’re people. And we’re all the same to the Goa’uld.”
When she opened her eyes again, Brenneka was at the dais, leaning her elbows on it with her hands clasped together, watching her. “But you’re wrong, aren’t you. We’re not all the same. We’re different from you.” She touched the back of her neck, then her throat. “They can’t use us like they use you, like puppets.”
Hooking her fingers on the edge of the dais, Sam looked up at her. “See, that’s it. We can learn from each other. This immunity you have. You must know what that means.”
Brenneka flattened her hands down on the dais and carefully smoothed dust from its surface. “When we left the Homeworld, there were eighty thousand of us. We came in three ships, sleeping, and when we arrived, each ship became a city. We weren’t fighters. We wanted to make beautiful things. With the knowledge of the Nitori, we were given a chance. We changed ourselves, the story says, as the Inspired taught us before he was absorbed by the Nitori, became one of them.” Her smoothing hands slowed to a stop. “By the time the Goa’uld found us again, we were almost a million, and we were different, in the blood, but still the same. We still weren’t fighters.” When she met Sam’s eyes, her gaze was piercing. “Now there are six thousand of us. Six thousand.” She leaned lower so that her face loomed over Sam’s. “That’s what it means. The Goa’uld destroy what they can’t have. And when we learned to kneel, and to beg—” She cut herself off and turned to look up at the fragment of the ship. “Who can blame the Nitori for leaving us?”
Sam thought of the mosaic eye, watching the sky, waiting, all in pieces.
“But,” Brenneka continued after awhile, “we never knelt to worship a worm. And maybe that will redeem us.”
“I’m sure it will. That’s a beginning.”
“Maybe your friend, Dr. Jackson, will help us,” Brenneka said as she turned the key in a lock and raised the lid of the dais.
The mention of Daniel sent a sliver of pain through Sam’s chest, and she grimaced. “He’s… compromised. I wouldn’t count on him now.”
After lowering the lid and placing a stone tablet flat on it, Brenneka crooked a finger at Sara, inviting her to join her on the raised platform. “Sebek will use what he knows and they will open the door. It doesn’t matter if Dr. Jackson helps willingly. It’ll still be help, won’t it?”
Revulsion ran through Sam at the way Brenneka casually dismissed Daniel’s life, but she said nothing. Instead, she leaned over Brenneka’s shoulder to run her fingers across the tablet. About the size of a dictionary, it was black like the stone of the mountain and deeply carved with familiar blocky shapes. “This is the same form of
writing that’s on the door.” Pieces fell together in her mind and the Nitori took on a familiar shape: Ancients.
Brenneka’s cheek rounded with a smile.
Trying to keep her excitement out of her voice, Sam asked, “Can you read it?”
When she shook her head, water droplets scattered from Brenneka’s hair onto the tablet. “No. But I know what it means.” She laid her hand reverently on the stone and wiped the water away. “This is the sacred writing of the Nitori. They’ve left us a message in the mountain. They’ve left us something there that will save us, as they did before.”
“Brenneka, I don’t think—”
She turned on Sam, her eyes alight. “Sebek, Dr. Jackson, they will open the door and my brother will find what the Nitori have left us, and he’ll destroy Sebek and prove that we’re not worthless. We’re not cringing vermin.”
Sam’s mouth was dry. “Destroy Sebek.”
“Yes!”
“And what about Daniel?”
“He is a vessel of the gods now. He has his part to play. We can’t interfere.”
“You know,” Sam said, barely controlling her anger, “we would have helped you. We didn’t have to be coerced. Daniel didn’t have to be—” She almost said “lost” but she snapped her teeth down on the word. “—put at risk.” When Brenneka’s hard expression didn’t change, Sam sighed and ran her fingers over the raised shapes on the tablet. “Why did you bring me here?”
“To show you that this is all much bigger than you, or your friend, or the worm, Sebek. What you want is irrelevant. Your friend has been brought here to serve the ends of the Nitori.”
“And you think that the Nitori want him to die?”
“We can’t know what the Nitori want. We can only see what they put in our path.” Now her face did soften with compassion, but only for a moment, as her hand covered Sam’s and then slipped away. “He’ll be free. Freedom has its price. I’m sure if you could ask him, he would agree.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Daniel’s body—if he could even call it his own anymore—was numb. But it wasn’t numbness, not really, because he recognized sensation, the way he would know that the punching throb against his eardrums on a crowded dance floor was music even if he couldn’t hear it. It was as if the world was too loud, so loud that his body was full to the point of being empty, overloaded to the point of white noise and nonsense, and all he had in his head to name it was “numb”.
He was too small for all that feeling.
Sebek thrashed inside him, and Daniel saw the floor close to his face, black stone with a blue sheen from some light source he couldn’t place. He saw his own hand splayed a few inches from his eyes, the fingers stiffly straining, the pads of each one white, and the nails white, too, except with a rim of red at the quick because of the way the hand was pressing hard against the stone. Sebek was trying to lever himself upright, but Daniel’s body was heavy and numb and full of noise, and he fell again—the floor right next to Daniel’s eye now, his face pressed against stone. Sebek made a sound with Daniel’s throat, a growl of frustration that Daniel felt inside his head and not in the body at all, but it was some kind of coherence to cling to, and so he did. The noise and numbness started to resolve again into thought and feeling, distantly: the cool stone against his cheek, a cold ache inside the globe of his knee, and the jutting bone of his hip where he’d fallen. Flares of color in the whited-out landscape of his being.
He could hear Aris’ voice, Jack’s, and a moment later, a heavy hand fell on the back of his neck, squeezing and then shifting to his shoulder. A wall loomed in front of him, with shadowed etchings, dancing figures, then skewed away into the blankness of ceiling. He was on his back now. Aris’ face came into view, wearing an expression of unconvincing concern, or so it seemed to Daniel. Those pale eyes held a distinct glimmer of satisfaction as he looked down at his Goa’uld master.
“My lord,” Aris said, the honorific colored by barely suppressed mockery.
Sebek was not in the mood for amusing ironies, it seemed, and his anger scraped a livid path through the static inside Daniel’s head. Daniel’s hand, the one without the ribbon device, passed through his field of vision as Sebek raised it. Aris gripped his hand and leaned back against his weight to pull him up; the walls angled around him, and Jack was suddenly there, on his ass with his legs askew and his fists pressed to his temples, broken finger sticking out with incongruous daintiness.
Jack must have known he was being watched, because he dropped his hands and followed Sebek’s progress. In the dim ambient light Daniel was close enough that even without his glasses he could see the red rash left by the ribbon device there between Jack’s eyebrows, the broken blood vessels a fine webbing on the skin on either side of his nose and around his bloodshot eyes. Jack rested his weight on his broken hand and then, with a hiss of pain, sat up again and cradled it for a second against his chest. Something about the gesture seemed to clarify the numbness in Daniel’s body—some memory of pain, maybe—and he could feel his legs again, fully, the weight of the ribbon device on his dangling hand, the fleeting touch of Sebek’s attention along his limbs as the bruises on his knee and hip were repaired and erased. Sebek drew his body up straight.
Jack screwed up his face in that expression that usually preceded a smart-assed remark and, true to form, said, “Nice impression of a fish on the bottom of a boat. Not very godlike, though.”
Daniel could feel the rage in the middle of his chest—Sebek’s chest—a tightening that started under the sternum and spread outward along the muscles and into his arms, tendons going taut and fingers curling, clenching into a fist, and if that feeling had a color it would be seething red. His centre of gravity shifted, his weight moving from his left foot to the right as Sebek pulled his left arm back and up. There was a sudden release of energy as the arm and its fist swung down and smashed Jack across the mouth. Daniel felt the give of muscle and the resistance of teeth and bone before Jack spun away with the force of the blow, and the shifting of weight again in the follow-through, anger boiling away and leaving behind the oily residue of satisfaction.
Daniel felt it all, a detailed parsing of his own body, because that was what Sebek could feel. Sebek enjoyed the violent art of the machine.
His mouth stretched into Sebek’s smile as Jack, knocked onto his shoulder, rolled to his knees and stood up, using Aris for balance. When Jack turned to face Sebek, the back of his hand was red with blood from his lip.
“This is godlike,” Sebek said, low and warning. “We are infused with the power of this place, and we are strong.” A tremor of fear rippled through the sharpening space of Sebek’s mind. Daniel tried to follow it, but Sebek smoothed it away.
“Strong enough to hit a guy when he’s down, anyway,” Jack answered, dabbing his lip with his sleeve.
The satisfaction wilted to disdain as Sebek turned away. Daniel watched Jack in his peripheral vision while Sebek turned his attention to Aris. Jack leaned to the side, one hand on Aris’ shoulder, and spat blood onto the floor. No teeth with it, at least. Daniel wondered what it would feel like to strangle himself—to strangle his own body. Serve Sebek right.
Sebek’s answer to that was immediate; there would be a price for insubordination. Daniel shrank back from what Sebek showed him—promised him—a threat, enacted from the twisted wreckage of Daniel’s own memory—Jack falling—and Sebek’s vision—a snake’s-eye view of a host being taken. Jack’s contorted face, now, as no worked its way between his clenched teeth. Sebek got that image from Daniel, Daniel’s memory of Jack in Hathor’s bunker, tied in the cryo-bed while the snake took him. Daniel could feel the tusks as they carved their way into flesh, Sebek’s experience relived time and again, the slight pressure of resistant skin giving way and then muscle quivering, resisting but unable to keep him out; the sideways slither around bone, the sinewy body winding, slick with excreted enzymes, ducking between tendons, sliding over the points and angles of vertebrae, seeking the
way to the brain, already starting to divide, ganglia extending into the spinal column. Daniel heard the echo of distant screaming, the host mind recoiling, and that became a picture, Jack crabwalking backward, scrambling away, away from Sebek, from Daniel, nowhere to go, and there was no place in Daniel’s memory where Sebek could have got that image because Jack never crawled in panic like that. Daniel’s mind had created this from fear, had made that picture out of the screaming, made Jack crawl, and there was nowhere to go. Sebek would take Jack, and Daniel would be dead, and there would be no way of stopping him, then.
Inside, Daniel went blank.
When he could see again, they were walking, Jack up front, Aris behind. The hallway curved to their left, dark beyond ten or fifteen feet or so. Wherever the light was coming from, it seemed to be rationed, because it faded behind them and crept ahead of them reluctantly, tantalizingly. Their boots clattered on the black stone, and echoes ricocheted along the narrow space so that sometimes it seemed like there was an army in here with them. On either side, the walls were alive with those still figures, caught midway through their dances.
Sebek hummed inside with satisfaction as he carried Daniel long between the murmuring walls, but the purring smoothness was deformed a little, silk folded around the shape of something underneath. It wasn’t precisely fear, but the symbols on the wall seemed to vibrate in his head, below the threshold of understanding, and it was a fine-toothed abrasion of his control. He strode on faster than the blooming light, pushing them toward… something.
Daniel watched Sebek as he traced a worn path through a list of grievances, lost opportunities, humiliations, felt the Goa’uld’s anger, his self-righteous conviction that he deserved more, always more. It was as though the place were singing in sympathy for his outrage, and each step they took brought Sebek closer to—revenge—fulfillment. Sebek, Daniel realized, believed that the silence was speaking to him, and the path that started in his failure wound its way inward, forward, toward promise. Aris was at his back, and Sebek knew that his hold on the bounty hunter was slight. Again, a shiver of fear, but Sebek crushed it. He was a god. A sudden, grotesque series of images slid up out of Sebek’s memory and assaulted Daniel: a crying child, a dead woman, Aris falling under the raining blows of mailed fists. A god would never fall to a slave. There was no thought of going back without his prize, no matter what risks were to be faced, or how terribly the place ravaged his host. And in any case, Sebek had options. With his gold-capped hand, he reached out and gave Jack a shove.
