by Jamie Duncan
“Weird,” was all the analysis O’Neill offered, and Jackson nodded. They fell quiet.
In the lull, for the first time since he’d descended down into this hellhole, Aris permitted himself to think of Aadi, unfolding the memories of his son like a piece of fragile paper. His son was no longer a child; he was old enough to control his own destiny. It would be good to give him that chance. He could see traces of his own nature in Aadi—his cunning, most of all. It seemed Aadi had grown ten years in a single night, but there had been many nights, first in Sokar’s mines, and then in the service of Apophis, and finally in chains forged by Sebek’s Jaffa. When Aris had last seen him, huddled in his cell, he had grown muscles where only skin and bones had been before, and his eyes had held a dull acceptance of how things had to be. That look pained Aris more than any wound or oppression ever could. Away from here, maybe, growing up wasn’t the same as giving in. His son’s face loomed in the shadows of his memory, and he couldn’t tuck it neatly away.
The tips of his fingers shook as a sound trickled through the darkness. He raised his head and listened. It was a child, sobbing. Impossible. He clasped his fingers together to stop the palsied shaking, then glanced at O’Neill and Jackson. They were both silent, their eyes closed, asleep on their feet. Aris groped for the roshna secreted in the pockets of his armor, but moved his hand away. The soft sound bubbled up again, one loud wail, subsiding to quiet crying. His son had cried that way when the Goa’uld had taken him from his mother’s arms. Aris could see him now, kicking his short legs, his mouth open in a scream of agony that had given way into snuffling sobs. He gritted his teeth and tried to block the memory, but, although it seemed to ebb, it came back stronger, like it had paused to gained strength: Aadi, thrashing with hunger as Aris cleaned his armor and prepared to sell his soul to feed his son. A low shiver crept up his spine.
Jackson and O’Neill were speaking again. With difficulty, Aris focused on the conversation.
“Daniel,” O’Neill said. “There’s something else. That woman. I’ve been seeing her longer than you have.”
“Is she—” Jackson began, but then his expression distorted, twisted, and he gasped, flailing for the wall. O’Neill straightened and backed up a step, but made no move to help him. Smart man; Aris had always known O’Neill’s instincts for self-preservation would come in handy here. They watched in silence as Jackson battled for control of his own body, the struggle playing out in a grotesque pantomime of jerking limbs and facial expressions. Aris’ fingers tightened on his weapon. If this was the time, he’d have to do it without telegraphing his intention to O’Neill, or there’d be a repeat of the touching intervention they’d had earlier.
Jackson slammed back against the one of the blank pillars, groping for a handhold, as palpable frustration radiated from O’Neill. Jackson made a strangled sound, and rasped, “Jack, quickly. Tell me.”
“Well, what if she’s really just a hallucination?”
“Brought on by this place,” Jackson said softly. “It’s a trick, to draw us in deeper.” He slid down the wall, one hand clasping at the other as if they were not connected, and Aris remembered Sebek seating the hand device between his fingers in that way. Jackson closed his eyes.
“He’s losing control,” Aris said to O’Neill, who nodded once at the obvious but said nothing. All his attention was focused on Jackson. Aris looked at O’Neill for a long, long moment, as a decision formed in the back of his mind. There was no trust between them, but they might be able to help each other.
After a moment, he drew his knife and held it out to O’Neill, offered in his open palm. A muscle in O’Neill’s jaw twitched as he looked at it first and then into Aris’ face. His expression was stony, but his eyes were wild. “I won’t need it,” he said, and made no move to take it. Aris didn’t need an interpreter. He’d seen what career soldiers could do with their bare hands.
With one swift motion, he sheathed the knife. “When you do,” he said casually, the offer implied.
Jackson’s eyes flew open and shifted over to them. His body relaxed and he slumped, exhausted, as if he’d been fighting for hours. Aris supposed he had, in a way. “Still here,” Jackson said. “For now.”
“Good,” Aris said. “Enough stories about your touching memories. What does it all mean?”
“I have no idea,” Jackson said. He wiped sweat from his face with the bottom of his t-shirt. “There’s almost no barrier between us anymore.”
“What? Between… ?” O’Neill frowned, his finger waving between himself and Jackson and Aris, and then pointing down the hallway at the distant glimmer of fading light. “The woman?”
“Sebek and me. I have better access to his memories, now, when he’s trying to get control. Before, I was working at getting at them, but now I can’t stop seeing them.” Jackson shook his head, then thumped it sharply against the wall. When he looked up at O’Neill, he smiled an odd, humorless smile and said, “I really don’t want to see them.”
“Join the club,” O’Neill said.
“Right,” Jackson answered. He pulled his knees up and propped his arms on them. “Sometimes I feel like saying something, and I’m not sure if I’m really the one who’s talking. I don’t know if it’s really me.”
Aris winced and spared a moment of gratitude that he’d never know what it was like. Much better to be dead.
“I can’t wait to blow up whatever is in the middle of this thing,” O’Neill said softly, but with such underlying savagery that Jackson tilted his head to look at him.
“Jack?”
O’Neill squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head violently. Aris’ first instinct was to pull him away from the wall, but he realized at that moment that O’Neill wasn’t touching anything. “Could someone please explain to me why I’ve got someone else’s memories running around in my head?” O’Neill sounded perfectly rational, but something in his posture… Jackson lurched to his feet.
“Jack, what are you seeing?”
“Dead children,” O’Neill said, his jaw set so hard Aris thought it might crack. “Dead planets. Big ugly motherships, Jaffa everywhere. Mines. Some big tower in the middle of a city, and… this mountain, but without the mine.” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could stop seeing that way. “This planet, I think. Not like it is now, though.”
Jackson hissed in a breath. “Uh-oh.”
“I’m losing patience,” Aris said. In fact, his patience had been lost hours ago, and now his skin was crawling as he watched O’Neill’s body go rigid with the effort of driving away whatever was invading his head.
“Those might be Sebek’s memories,” Jackson said, staring at O’Neill. “Goa’uld genetic memories, maybe; I can’t tell. But he showed that to me.”
O’Neill swayed. Aris gripped his arm and shoved him roughly against the support of the wall.
“Nice,” O’Neill said bitterly. “Like I didn’t have enough crap of my own in here.” He cast a narrow-eyed glance at Aris, but looked away when he said, “Crying. There’s a baby, crying.” Again, he screwed shut his eyes and covered his ear with one hand. “Damnit,” he muttered tonelessly.
Jackson turned Aris, waiting for confirmation, but Aris kept his face bland, even though all of his skin was prickling.
Jackson nodded, letting it go, and stepped closer to O’Neill, protectively. There was irony there, but Aris wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it properly. An insistent ache had been building at the base of his skull for hours; the roshna was eating him alive. No way to know how long it would take to reach the center, if there even was a center, and no way to get out. And now this pleasant development.
Things weren’t looking up.
“We need to get moving,” Aris said, and shook O’Neill by the arm. “Now.”
“What’s your hurry?” O’Neill pushed Aris’ hand off.
“No, Jack, he’s right.” Jackson began wandering away from them, back down the corridor, but O’Neill caught him by the shoulder and sto
pped him. Aris glanced down into the darkness and saw nothing, but… the feeling of their guide was with him, as if he could hear her speaking and see her hand beckoning to them. This way. Hurry.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be so hot to follow her,” O’Neill said, staring in the same direction, but clearly he could see what Aris was missing. If he looked askance, though, she flickered at the edges of his vision.
“You have a better option for us?” Aris asked.
“You’ve got me there,” O’Neill said. He released Jackson’s shoulder, and Jackson began moving immediately, as if someone had tugged him on a string. Then he stopped abruptly. O’Neill stepped warily toward him. “Daniel?”
The hair on the back of Aris’ neck rose as though someone was behind him. He turned, but it was the same darkness as before, nothing of substance hiding there.
Beside him, O’Neill muttered, “What the hell?” and jumped away from him, swinging at thin air. Aris sidestepped and pressed against the opposite wall, his weapon raised.
“Okay, now she’s just screwing with us,” O’Neill said angrily.
Aris could hear her now, not a voice in his head, but in the echoing maze. You must hurry! He glanced over at O’Neill, who nodded at him, and then at Jackson, who was standing perfectly still, staring down the corridor. “Jackson? You hear that?”
“We have heard the voice of our ascendancy,” Sebek said, in his strange distorted growl, “and we will use this place to claim our rightful power, and to unseat our Lord Yu from this world, and all the others his hand has touched.”
O’Neill winced. Jackson fell forward on his knees. Neither O’Neill nor Aris made a move to pick him up. Too risky to get too close, if Sebek was driving.
“Damn,” Jackson said, in the weariest tone Aris had ever heard.
“It’s… hard to push him back.”
“You sure that was Sebek?” O’Neill asked, and now he did move to help Jackson up. “I’ve always thought you had a jones to take over the universe.”
“That’s beside the point,” Jackson said, offering a weak smile, which O’Neill returned.
“Let’s move,” Aris said again. “Get this over with.” He stepped up beside Jackson, and the three of them resumed their trek into the dark.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After her feet skidded out from under her for the fourth time on the slick stone of the tunnel floor, Sam didn’t bother cursing under her breath. She cursed over her breath, or whatever the opposite was. The not-very-ladylike word got caught under the low ceiling and the echoes bounced back and forth like there was someone further down the tunnel in the dark who had also skinned the heels of her hands again and whose backside was also soaked. Sam was happy for the commiseration, even though the echoes reminded her that they were trying to be stealthy, and that bitching out loud wasn’t exactly textbook.
Still, it felt good. So she did it again. When she got home, she was going to lock herself in the bathroom and curse for five minutes straight. It wasn’t much as far as rewards went, but at the moment it seemed pretty damn appealing.
She let Teal’c pull her to her feet, wiped her hands on her thighs, and found Hamel in the gloomy light of the flash stick.
“How much farther?”
If they had to grope their way across the entire city, they’d be at it a long time. Condensation dripped from the ceiling and down the back of her jacket. In the distance, the sound of rushing water pulled at her concentration.
Hamel pushed between Behn and Frey to take the light stick from her. “Not far. Just a little way now.”
She waited until the little band of soldiers got moving again and followed the sound of their bare feet slapping on the wet stone. Teal’c fell into step beside her and put out a steadying hand as one foot skidded out from under her again. Her rueful laugh tumbled around in the echoes.
Hamel was true to his word, though. It wasn’t much farther. In fact, the next time she lost her footing, she slid into Eche and the two of them ended up knee deep in the river. Or, at least, it was knee deep once they struggled to their feet again, and Sam caught Eche when the current knocked him over before he got fully upright. His momentum almost took them both down again. By this time, Sam’s head was ringing with all the cursing she was going to do when she got home.
The frigid water smelled lifeless and oily. She indulged in a brief fantasy about her bathrobe.
“Please tell me we aren’t wading the rest of the way,” she said to Hamel, who coughed out a chuckle and waved Behn and Rebnet off into the shadows.
They took the light stick with them, and the rest of them stood shivering on the river bank. Sam kept a hand twisted in the arm of Teal’c’s jacket and someone, she didn’t know who but suspected Eche, had his hand twisted in the waistband of hers. After she’d started to wonder if Behn and Rebnet had abandoned them down here in the dark, she heard them coming back their way, accompanied by the hollow thudding of water against something large and empty.
It turned out to be a flat-bottomed boat with low sides and tall spars at bow and stem, each one with a clasp hanging loose and swinging against the wood.
“In,” Hamel ordered and held the boat steady while everyone but him and Frey clambered in and sat down between the moldy ribs.
Their feet slipping every second step or so, he and Frey leaned hard against the current until they managed to get the boat moving slowly upstream. Finally they came to the edge of the landing where the sloping tunnel met the river, and the wall of stone cut off further progress along the bank. Here, Frey scrambled into the boat and helped Hamel attach the clasps to a double rope looped through a pulley waist-high on yet another tunnel wall. Once the boat was attached, Hamel jumped in, and the two men began to draw the boat along against the current by pulling the rope handover-hand. The boat moved slowly but steadily upstream, through a tunnel barely wide enough to accommodate it. The tallest of them all, Teal’c had to hunch low to keep from banging his head on the ceiling. After a few moments of listening to Hamel and Frey breathing and grunting, Sam and Teal’c crawled over and knelt next to the rope—the others moving port to balance the boat—and leaned their own weight into the effort. If it hadn’t been for the slight variation in shadows on the stone that skimmed along beside her head, Sam would have doubted that they were moving at all.
But they were. Progress. She had to admit that, in spite of the blisters blooming on her palms, and the aching of her bruised back, it felt good to do something, finally, and it made a lot of sense to go under the ha’tak instead of around it. No Jaffa patrols to dodge, no craven city-dwellers to turn them in. As she settled into the rhythm and adjusted her breathing, stretched her arms and flexed her muscles, she let herself fall away from doubt for a few minutes, allowed herself to forget to think ahead, to look only as far as the darkness at the bow of the boat and to think only of keeping the tension up on the rope as she reached for another yard of progress.
It was only a temporary indulgence, but when Aadi touched her shoulder and took her place, her mind was a little clearer. She found a space between Eche and Behn on the bottom of the boat, and set herself to the task of deploying her resources in her head, Teal’c on point, herself on their six with the knife and the zat. They’d use the stun grenades only as a last resort. Those would likely be key to any exit strategy that would involve a dash for the ’gate.
But the period of clarity wouldn’t last, she knew. She could already feel it, that agitation at the base of her skull and a prickle along her arms like ants scurrying inside her bones, and the well-made plans started to fall apart in her head, too reckless, too risky. She had to force her mouth open a little and put her tongue between her teeth to keep them from grinding. And the nausea was back, too, made worse by the lurch-and-stop of the boat as it labored against the current.
Beside her, Teal’c shifted uncomfortably. “We must be nearing the mine,” he observed.
“Yeah. I feel it, too.” Craning her neck to look back at Hamel in
the stern, she asked, “You people don’t feel anything when you get close to the vault?”
Hamel shook his head, and Sam could see the others do the same. “This is why Sebek sent us into that section of the mine, to try to dig around the door. This is how Brenneka’s brother—not Aris, the other one—learned of the sacred writing there. But Sebek was impatient, and he finally came himself, and when Ky wouldn’t tell him what the writing said, he killed him.”
“Ky could read the writing of the Nitori?” Sam asked.
“No, of course not. No one can.”
“Sebek would not accept excuses,” Teal’c said.
“No.”
“He killed him with the light in his hand.” Aadi’s words were muffled as he leaned forward to reach for the rope. “He wouldn’t let me and Bren take Ky home or bury him. He’s still there, in the mine, right where he died. People have to step over him to get to work. They’re afraid to touch him because of Sebek.”
The hatred in his voice was palpable. A whisper scurried along the tunnel and back again as the crew cursed in unison and snapped the Goa’uld’s neck between their fingers. Even Frey and Aadi paused in their work to do it, leaving Teal’c to keep the boat from backsliding in the current.
Hamel nudged Sam’s thigh with his toe. “Will you be able to fight, like this, when you’re sick from the place?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, we will.” She resisted the urge to scrub at her hair, dislodge the imaginary ants on her skin. “Just follow my orders and we’ll be okay.”
Hamel looked a little skeptical, but he nodded. “Maybe your friend will help us. If he is what you say he is.”
“Maybe.”
She turned back and stared at the dark walls passing inches away. It felt as though she were the boat, and the rope dragging her forward was invisible, twisted in her ribs. If she closed her eyes she could see it, tight and urgent, yanking her unevenly toward the vault. It wasn’t just the need to get to Daniel and the Colonel, either, but something undefined and insistent, like a craving, like thirst. In her mind’s eye, Daniel and the Colonel were pushed to the periphery of her vision and the rope carried on beyond them into darkness. Something was waiting.
