by Jamie Duncan
Brenneka nodded at her approach and said, “Esa has returned from the mine. Sebek and your friend and my brother have entered the vault. But the Jaffa were prevented from entering with them.” She did Sam the favor of not smiling, but her pale eyes glittered with anticipated triumph. “It won’t be long now.”
“Until Aris kills Daniel,” Sam finished for her. It was impossible for her to keep her voice down now.
“Until he kills Sebek. Your friend is already dead.”
“We know that’s not true. We know the host survives. If we go now, if you help us, we can stop this. We can stop Sebek, and we can get to whatever’s hidden in that mountain. We can do it together.”
“And you will take the gift and keep it for yourselves.”
“No. No.” Sam counted to five, mastering her temper. It was time to do something. It could already be too late. There was no way the Colonel would let Aris do that to Daniel. No way. The thought of the Colonel having to kill Daniel himself with nobody there to share the burden of it made her brain white out with static. This time she had to count all the way to ten before she had her frustration tamped down again. Firmly, but calmly, she met Brenneka’s eyes with all the sincerity she could muster. “That’s not how it works. It’s not how we work. Please, Brenneka.”
The small woman shook her head brusquely and tried to push past her.
“I’ve seen the Nitori,” Sam blurted. “Your gods.”
That worked. Brenneka stopped and turned slowly to look at her. In fact, everyone in the room was looking at her. Including Teal’c, who didn’t look happy at all.
Brenneka’s expression didn’t change. She watched Sam suspiciously, her arms wrapped around her body as though she’d suddenly gotten colder. “You said you didn’t know the Nitori.”
“Well, not as Nitori, no. We call them the Ancients.” Sucking in a bracing breath, Sam kept her eyes on Brenneka’s. On the other side of the room, Teal’c was on his feet. “And Daniel’s one of them.”
It took a long time for Brenneka to decide what to do with her face. She settled on indignation. “We are the people of the Nitori,” she hissed.
Behind her, the room was starting to buzz, the sprawled men sitting up and whispering to each other. That curse made a ripple through the room, but Sam noticed that not all of the men took it up.
“Yes, of course you are,” Sam answered, letting her gaze slip significantly to the crowd before meeting Brenneka’s again. “But it’s a big universe, and the Nitori got around. You aren’t the only ones, Brenneka.” She pointed behind her in the general direction of the mine. “And if you let Aris kill Daniel, you’ll be killing—”
“Major Carter,” Teal’c interrupted from the far side of the room, but Sam aimed a warning look at him and hurried on.
“You said that you were taught how to build the ships by someone… the Inspired. And that person was absorbed by the Nitori.”
Another flutter of voices in the room, heads bowing briefly over clasped hands.
“It was a gift,” Brenneka said, her voice hard, but brittle.
“Well, that same thing happened to Daniel. They call it ascension.” Struck by a realization, Sam came forward and started to move the gathered people aside, ushering and urging them toward the edges of the room until there was an open space of floor, only Brenneka still standing there alone amid the swirling colors of the broken tile mosaic. Sam pointed at their feet. It wasn’t an image of waves like she’d first thought. “See? I know this.” With her toe, she traced the tendrils of white on their background of blue. “This is the Nitori. This is what Daniel looked like when he left us.” Her voice catching on the last words, she blinked back sudden tears. God, she was tired. “And you said there was a cache of knowledge that was left and the Inspired took it all in. That’s what happened to the Colonel, years ago. He learned all that the Ancients, the Nitori, knew. He learned enough to go to another galaxy.”
Holding up both hands, Brenneka turned her head away as though from the burning heat of a house fire. Around them, the kinsmen were silent and perfectly still.
Sam pressed on. “There was a device at a special meeting place. It reached out and grabbed the Colonel by the head and there were lights—”
“And the Nitori enfolded him, and the lights filled him and when he spoke the world changed—” It was Hamel, coming forward, nodding.
“—and the people changed and—” another man said, his voice wavering, fearful, faltering before another picked up the almost-song.
“—the universe opened like a flower and—”
“—the people were like seeds blowing in the dark sky—”
“You lie,” Brenneka said flatly, with the same common sense conviction she’d use to say that the rain was falling.
“Why do you think Sebek wanted Daniel, specifically Daniel? There are lots of people in this galaxy who could eventually crack that message on the door. It’s because of what Daniel wa—What Daniel is, what the Colonel is. What they know.” Sam was right next to Brenneka now, using her greater height, looming over the woman. Her back was prickling with the intensity of the attention on her, and her gut was twisting with distaste for what she was about to do. “If you let Daniel and the Colonel die, you’ll be killing the closest link you have to your gods. How worthy will you be then?”
When she glanced over Brenneka’s head, she found Teal’c on the edge of the crowd, and his face was stone.
Daniel was beginning to understand: isolate the pathways, sneak through the nervous system into the framework of his body as if it were a spider’s web of conduits, and find the place where action was needed. This was why, for the past half hour, he’d been twitching his little finger. Not much, just a fraction of an inch. Barely any energy was required to make the connections, and Sebek was preoccupied with the maze and the path they were walking.
So far, Sebek hadn’t noticed.
His finger twitched, twitched, and Daniel curled up at the back of his own body, waiting for another chance to drive. Now that he knew he could do it, he only had to wait for the chance to shift forward and exert control.
Everything was trial and error, experiments performed on a wisp of hope that Sebek wouldn’t discover his intentions and turn on him. The torture Sebek inflicted on him for failure to comply was like acid in his brain, seeping through his thoughts and shorting him out, until Daniel wasn’t a coherent presence anymore. When Sebek punished him, Daniel became a mass of disorganized impulses, misfiring. He knew that sensation, a weightless fear, as if he were falling up, uncontained by gravity.
He was getting the hang of drawing a curtain between his memories and Sebek’s insistent probes. As long as Sebek didn’t seek specific information, Daniel could keep his thoughts neutral, shrunk down like blips on the radar, appearing and disappearing before Sebek could be distracted into paying attention to them.
Twitch, twitch. The hand his finger was attached to began to tremble, the muscles spasming—not his doing, not his control. He felt the weakness seize his body and shake it, throwing Sebek back and Daniel forward, and he gasped, unprepared for the sensation of boundaries collapsing. All he needed was a few more minutes, and he would find a way to convince Jack. There had to be a way, but he didn’t dare think about it too closely, for fear Sebek would steal any workable idea from him and use it to trick Jack. Sebek pressed, twisted inside him, and Daniel retreated ahead of the wave of mind-shattering fire. This time, when he gasped, it wasn’t audible.
The barriers between them were beginning to fall and rise without warning, like a wave cresting, then collapsing back down to the dark water, only to repeat again moments later. If only he could figure out how to be on top of the wave. He had to get himself in position to seize the chances. Sebek was weakening; Daniel was sure of it now. The Goa’uld’s control of Daniel was taking all Daniel’s strength, and the aching palsy of his muscles was only a symptom of it. His eyesight was getting worse in increments large enough for Daniel to perceiv
e, like the changing of a lens over his eye. He knew, though he wasn’t sure how, that Sebek could not heal his eyes. He needed his glasses, but they’d come too far to go back for them now—another thing Daniel could use to his advantage, provided he wasn’t blind by the time he had a chance to strike.
Vividly and without warning, the image of Sha’re flashed through his thoughts, a burst of light that brought with it the heat of her body and the fresh-scrubbed soap scent of her skin. This must have been what it was like for her, trying to reach him—to thrash and push against invisible bonds, working all the time, from within, fighting for moments of dominance, every thread of information she gave to him, in the last seconds of her life. He shuddered under the weight of her memory, and Sebek staggered, knocked off balance by Daniel’s attempt to bury the thought of his dead wife. Instantly he turned inward to see what Daniel was hiding, crashing through all the futile roadblocks until-he had all of the memory: all the things that hadn’t been true, all the cues and clues, dissolving into the sight of her pale, dead face inches from his own. Sebek’s satisfaction was clear as he discarded the image as unnecessary, and Daniel let himself see Sha’re as she had been, so beautiful, before she’d been taken as a host. He could hear her voice, soothing him, before he locked the image away.
Ahead of Sebek in the passageway, Jack was walking slowly. In the dim light, Daniel could make out the fuzzy lines of his torso, but Aris was nowhere to be seen. Daniel couldn’t tell where the bounty hunter was, because he didn’t have access to all his senses, but he thought Aris must have been behind them all along. Daniel was able to sense things Sebek was shielding from him, a dull, distant perception, like sound dampened by cotton. Frustration seeped through, and a simmering anger, something Daniel interpreted as hatred of Jack, of Daniel, of his own weakness. He shied back away from those thoughts and watched Jack as well as he was able.
At each turn, Jack stopped, then chose a direction. It looked as though he had no idea where he was going, and Daniel had no way to help. Even if Sebek had allowed him that much control, at this juncture Sebek wasn’t interested in knowing any more about the walls or the writing or the secrets at the heart of… wherever this was. He only wanted to arrive. Jack was moving only because he had to bide his time. Daniel had no idea what had happened to Sam and Teal’c, and he knew it was on Jack’s mind as well.
Jack slowed at the corner, as he had at every other corner. He rounded too close to the wall and his flashlight crashed gently into the wall, gashing the edges. The dent obliterated a panel of glyphs, slashing across them like an eraser. Daniel would have snapped at Jack to be careful, since they didn’t know what they might need to make their way out again, but he had no voice to do so. Still, the thought ran through his mind.
Too late, he realized that his concern was loud enough to be felt by Sebek, who lifted Daniel’s hand. In an instant, the flow of naquadah in Daniel’s blood burned and ignited, coalescing at the point of power in the palm of Daniel’s hand, and he watched helplessly as the energy burst from the hand device, hit Jack squarely in the back and sent him sprawling to the ground, still and quiet. Daniel’s outrage was a small, silent thing in the back of Sebek’s consciousness, and Sebek squashed Daniel’s protest that they needed Jack, that it wouldn’t do any good to harm him now. “Get up, human,” Sebek said coldly, without bothering to inform Jack what his transgression had been.
Sebek glanced at the damaged wall, and Daniel replayed the scene in his mind’s eye: Jack’s hand, moving, striking—he’d seen Jack do this, or a version of it, a hundred times, a dozen different ways of leaving a trail for himself to follow, or a trail to lead others to him. He’d shown Daniel how, in his first year on the team, and told him that it was always crucial he leave a trail if he was captured. Daniel had done it, more than once.
Sebek mustn’t know.
Daniel tried to forget the realization, erase it from the places in his mind where Sebek was always watching, but too late; it was impossible to remember every moment that his fleeting thoughts could be so easily captured by Sebek. He stared at Jack, who was pushing up slowly from the ground as if he was tired.
“So,” Sebek said, with a trace of harsh glee. “You formed a plan of escape. You could not truly be so stupid as to believe we would not discover it.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed; Daniel had the impulse to squint, to see more clearly, but he wasn’t able to control his body. Jack raised his hands in a mock gesture of supplication. “You caught me,” he said, still staring at Sebek with contempt clear in his expression. “Good for you.”
“We will not tolerate insolence,” Sebek growled, and Jack snorted.
“Oh, there’s that word. Insolence.” His face scrunched, as if he smelled something foul, and then he said, “If you weren’t running around in Daniel’s head, you would never have figured it out. You’re not too bright, for a snake.”
Sebek’s impulse was immediate. He raised Daniel’s hand, but something stopped him—the image of the former host, ravaged and burned out, seared across Daniel’s mind, leaving a scar—fear—behind it. As much as it made Daniel cringe to do it, he summoned up the same image Sebek used to torment him: Jack saying no as the snake burrowed into his neck, and then Sebek’s remembered satisfaction at the sensation of bringing a new, strong host under his control. Sebek lowered his hand.
“If you attempt any other tricks, we will kill you where you stand.”
Daniel barely contained his relief before it rippled out across Sebek’s attention.
Jack regarded Sebek for a long moment. His gaze shifted to Aris, who was standing where Daniel couldn’t see his face, then back to Sebek. “Listen,” he said. “Do you have some kind of plan? Or are we going to wander around in here until we starve to death? Because we are getting nowhere.”
The Goa’uld tilted his head to look at Jack, and suddenly he was pushing and clawing his way through Daniel’s thoughts again, raking out the pieces he’d examined before. Daniel let him have them without a fight. There was no point; he could take all that, and more besides, and Daniel still wouldn’t know how to read the walls. After a moment, Sebek said, “We will continue until we reach an end.”
“Fabulous plan,” Jack said. His eyes were dark, and there were bruised-looking circles beneath. “But what if I won’t keep walking?”
“Oh, you will,” Aris said. Jack glanced back at him, and something shifted in his expression, so subtle that Daniel almost didn’t catch it. His jaw tightened, and he looked back at Sebek, into his eyes. For a moment, Daniel felt as though Jack could see through Sebek, down to where Daniel was locked away. Then Jack turned and sketched, easing tired muscles. He rested a hand on the wall, above the gash.
The wall turned to light beneath his touch.
All the glyphs within three feet of them were ablaze, patterns of cool white and yellow fading back and forth across the dark background of stone. Jack jerked his hand away and stared at it. “Huh,” he said, and looked down at his hand, as if it were a foreign appendage.
“Why have you concealed this from us?” Sebek said, furious, but Daniel was watching the play of illumination over the symbols. If he could discern some kind of pattern…
“I haven’t concealed anything,” Jack was saying. “Well, okay—I was hiding something, but not this.” Daniel knew it was true. He’d seen Jack touching the walls on and off throughout this entire nightmare, and nothing had activated because of it, until now. But why now? The technology here wasn’t Ancient; it was something quite different. Shallow golden light fanned across Jack’s face, then across Daniel and Aris. Sebek turned to it, entranced by the possibilities of what it might signify, but he didn’t interfere with Daniel’s examination of the text.
“Whoa,” Jack said. Sebek gave him a cursory glance, in time for Daniel to see Jack raise his hands to his face to press the heels of his hands against his closed eyes.
White light, and the illusory face of Oma Desala. Grief. Peace. Resignation. Sam, crying; Ja
ck, watching him with haunted eyes. A sense that beyond what he could understand and perceive, there was knowledge waiting for him. A chance to do good.
Sebek slapped at Daniel’s head, keening a sharp cry as the memory ripped through Daniel’s consciousness: Daniel’s thoughts at the moment of his ascension—moments he hadn’t dwelled on, because he couldn’t bear to think of them. Sebek thrashed within Daniel’s body, and Daniel felt them falling, felt the jolt to his knees as they landed on the hard ground. Violent nausea welled within him, and confusion—Sebek’s confusion. Daniel wanted to take control, but he was lost, swimming among the glittering fragments of his life. There was no air, nothing to breathe, or maybe it just felt that way. Daniel’s chest felt crushed, and Sebek’s shrill wail filled his head until he could hear nothing else.
Slowly, the onslaught of memory eased away. Sebek retched, his misery apparent. Daniel had a moment of vicious satisfaction. So much for Goa’uld healing, in this place. He watched Aris dragging Jack upright, saw them exchange words, but he couldn’t make them out. Sebek lifted Daniel’s body and got to his feet, turning his attention back to the wall. The bright fire behind the symbols had faded, and now glowed like banked-down coals. Sebek took a step forward, then another, with Daniel’s hand outstretched. Daniel could feel the pull of the thing, the compulsion to touch it.
No, Daniel thought, as loudly as he could, and Sebek jerked his hand back. Daniel communicated to Sebek that he mustn’t touch it, no matter what. No time to worry about helping Sebek do whatever he planned to do, at the end of this. Right now he was only concerned with making sure no one did anything stupid. He wanted to speak to Jack, tell him not to touch the wall again under any circumstances, but Sebek’s calculated strategy didn’t include warnings for Jack. He moved closer to the wall, not touching it, but tracing the lines of the symbols with his gaze. Daniel could feel it, too. They were close to understanding… something.
